Burning out.

Today was a long and exhausting day. I spent 90% of it cleaning and directing the kids in cleaning. After all of this work, the toys are now sorted out. The books are all organized on their shelves. The toybox is full and sitting in its proper location. The extra blankets are stowed in the kids' chests. We got a lot of stuff done. Looking around the room, though, it doesn't feel like we did. Thinks were relatively picked up this morning.

I tripped over a few toys as I was walking across the room and saw a bin full of just random stuff. I got angry. Then I started cleaning. The kids were confused when I dumped out the toybox. They were even more confused when I insisted that they couldn't just throw anything in there. It was a painful process to sort all of their toys. They didn't like it. I didn't like it. But it was something that hadn't been done in over two years. When things started to shape up as how they were going to get put away, it got easier.

I'm glad that I saved those stupid McDonald's halloween buckets. I used four of them. Two to hold dinosaurs and random animals. One to hold knock off transformer toys (which were in happy meals originally) and one to hold all of the action figures they've got. We have three gallon sized bins full of toy cars and an additional fleet stowed neatly beneath a shelf and a table, mostly. I have recycled a large box that held pullups to hold large dinosaur toys and large action figures. I also recycled a slightly smaller box to hold stuffed animals.

The big innovation was taking the box that Cuddle Bear's toy weed wacker came in and turning it into a shelf on the wall. Instead of holding the weed wacker, it is full of small stuffed animals. The whole affair is light enough that it can stay up with three anchor points. The other innovation came from taking a box that the electric grill came in and cutting it up to make a 'tool box' out of it. Between the two tool boxes they had to begin with and this third one, they have 90% of their toy hand tools put away underneath their toy workbench. Sitting on top of it is the rubber work belt that came with it (with tools in their respective places) and a handful of others with it.

I have folded up the extra blankets that the kids kept shoving around on their beds and put them in the base of their chests from Grandpa M. When they went to bed, they didn't notice the blankets missing. Maybe we can manage to get to the beginning of cool weather before they come back out. I don't know. It did make for them to have an easier time making their beds. (This is a new thing. The kids mess up the sheets on their beds and, in the past, we fixed them. Now they are taking responsibility for it. The results thus far have been mixed. Hopefully putting the blankets away, this will make for more positive results.)

Their brand-name Transformers toys are sitting on top of their bookcase. The extra large ones are in back against the wall. The smaller ones are towards the front, where they are easier to access. Snuggle Bug broke Cuddle Bear's new one this afternoon, so I took away his more complicated version of Bumblebee. We'll see if he bears this in mind when he is sharing with his brother. If he breaks his brother's brand new transformer again, I believe that I will have to put them up for a bit. As it stands, we are missing one somewhere. In all of our cleaning, we have not found it. I suspect it is under the couch, which we did not touch today.

I didn't get the kitchen clean. I ran out of energy for that. I didn't get any laundry put away. And I have a pile of mail that I really need to go through but I am apprehensive about it all. I look back over the day today and I realize that in some respects today's big business of going through the toys was a form of procrastination. Because why procrastinate in a small way when you can go huge, right? Thus, tomorrow morning, I think I will do a 'bad mommy' thing and let the kids watch cartoons as I go through the mail, balance the checkbook, pay bills, and make official phone calls.

I'm super anxious about looking for a new psychiatrist. I'm afraid that they're going to look at my file from where I have been getting services and take the abject nonsense that these people have written as gospel and ignore what I have to say about it all. Money anxiety is taking a backseat to this.