that parenting preparation email was right

A while back, I got an email with a list of things to do to check and see if one were ready to be a parent. It had a list of things like stick a fish stick in the back seat of your car and leave it there for a week, and put a peanut butter and jelly sandwich in the VCR. One of the items was to prepare you for feeding a baby. It said to cut a small hole in a gourd, hang the gourd from the ceiling, and swing it. Then prepare some baby food, and try to spoon it into the swinging gourd. I originally read this, and laughed, but thought to myself, how much can an infant really move when you're feeding it?

Then, this past week, I was feeding my 12-month-old. I was just sitting on the couch with her food and she was standing up on the floor and I was feeding her that way. When she was getting full, she started swaying dramatically from side to side, but still had her mouth wide open to accept another bite. I was unsuccessful in getting the spoon into her swaying mouth, and suddenly remembered the email from long ago.

I got back home today after visiting my family for a week. It was a very tiring trip. My nephews are now 4 (next month), 2.5 and 1.5, and they are exhausting to be around. My family kept telling me to "just wait" and one day Lydia would be just the same. But I'm hoping that the parenting techniques I'm learning from Raising Godly Tomatoes will pay off. It's a very Bible-based way of parenting, and one of the keys is to start early, which I believe I have done with Lydia. I believe I'm seeing results, but people who aren't around us all day just think that it's her personality, or it's because she's a girl, or it's because she's still young, etc. Hopefully it'll become more evident to strangers as she gets older that she knows how to listen and obey -- the first time I ask her to.

I'm once again about to go through a decluttering phase. Every so often, our apartment just gets to feeling too cramped and crowded and there's "stuff" everywhere and it starts driving me crazy. I'm going to start in our bedroom, since in all my other decluttering phases, I still haven't managed to thoroughly go through our dresser drawers. There's no doubt clothes in there that I have forgotten I even have, and that no longer fit me, and that I probably won't wear again even if they DO fit me, etc. Hopefully I will be able to clear out a bunch of drawers and put different things in them that currently don't have a home, which will at least get things out of sight. Right now the task seems elephant-sized, but I just have to remember to "eat" the elephant one bite at a time.