Keeping House – Felicity in Domesticity

April 26, 2023 Elizabeth

How to Feed a Gecko When You Really Hate Crickets

Keeping House, Kids, Self-Care

Context #1: Why I Hate Crickets

In the Summer of 2012, there was a drought in Oklahoma. It was so dry that a certain parasite could not survive. Said parasite usually eats many, many cricket eggs in the early summer, but this year, all the crickets hatched in late summer. When I arrived on campus to begin my senior year of college, and on into the fall semester, basically until it got cold enough to freeze, I learned firsthand what a “plague” of insects is like. There were so many of them on the sidewalks that one could not physically avoid crunching them while walking or biking across campus. They swarmed around street lights at night. They somehow came into apartments through air vents. And the smell of their rotting corpses wafted across campus from the mass graves that happened to be created each time exterminators came through with pesticides.

One evening….

April 21, 2021 Elizabeth

How to Go Through the Playroom

Keeping House

Or, How to say good-bye to some of your kids’ toys so that you can reclaim your sanity as well as “the playroom” or whatever area the toys are rearing their unmanageably numerous heads in your home.

I breathe a contented little sigh of “things are as they should be” when I arrive at the top of my stairs and gaze out at a vast expanse of carpet in all directions uninterrupted by toys and other “things that don’t belong here.” I wish I could say that this is what greets me at the top of the stairs every time, every day, but let’s be honest:….

December 24, 2020December 24, 2020 Elizabeth

We Bought a Tree

Keeping House

While this is primarily the story of how we bought a Christmas tree, I wanted to sneak in the shorter stories of our other recent “big” purchases as a family, just because I like telling the stories.

((A Grill))

We’d never owned a grill during our seven years of marriage. Well, I take that back. We had a George Foreman for the first five years, something Justin already owned when we met. It was our go-to method of cooking chicken to put on salads, among other things, before we got our sous vide. It didn’t survive the We’re Moving Purge of 2018. Anyway….

October 7, 2020 Elizabeth

2,000 Things Less

Keeping House

Today I want to talk about how I got rid of 2,000 (yes, two thousand) items from my home before we moved. If there is one thing that moving frequently has taught me, it’s that I do not need all the stuff I once had. Nor do I want all of it badly enough to be willing to pack it and move it and unpack it (or never unpack it and re-move the box anyway) again, and again, and again.

Therefore, back in February, when we first found out that yes, we are moving, I began working on decluttering our home….

September 14, 2020 Elizabeth

The Art of Packing Up Everything You Own

Keeping House

While moving is so overwhelmingly on my mind, I have a couple of insider tips I want to share. I consider myself an insider here (where one is moving), because I have done it so frequently as an adult. This one I’m in the middle of is my sixth move in not quite seven years of marriage, not to mention the in-and-out of dorms and apartments every year of college before that. (1) I moved to our (formerly Justin’s) apartment right after the wedding. (2) We moved one breezeway over to a two-bedroom apartment when I was pregnant with Miryam. (3) We moved to my parents’ house in Missouri when Justin’s position became one of “three weeks on, three weeks off.” (4) We moved to our own first house a few minutes away when Justin got a new job in town. (5) We moved to our DFW area home less than a year later when Justin got a new new job after deciding he needed a different work environment. (6) And we’re moving next week to a new city for a new position at the same company he was already at.

So. Many. Moves.

I wish I was so good at dance moves. But….

August 19, 2020 Elizabeth

Shade Trees and Other Important Things

Keeping House

Or, Me Ranting and Raving About Matters of Personal Preference.

Now that our home is under contract for sale (YAY!), I get to look at “new” homes in the area we’re moving to, in earnest. I had, of course, been looking at them online already, for quite some time. Zillowing is a verb in my vocabulary; it’s a fun pastime while nursing a baby to sleep. I must say I am now pretty good at piecing together a home’s floor plan based on the listing description and photos. It’s kind of like a logic puzzle….

August 3, 2020 Elizabeth

Current Status: Trying to Sell My House

Keeping House

((Our house is officially on the market, now!))

Shout out to my mom for offering to meet Justin halfway to pick up our big kids and take them to Camp Grandma’s House for a week so we could focus on tasks without neglecting the children. When she first offered, I thought, “Oh we probably don’t actually need that.” As soon as the first picture came through via text of them having fun there—while I was scrubbing their drawings off yet another wall here—I realized my initial reaction was plain wrong. We totally needed that.

The last time we had to get a house ready to sell….

July 20, 2020 Elizabeth

Discoveries While Deep Cleaning

Keeping House

We’re currently in the midst of getting our house ready to sell. One of the most obvious items on the to-do list is to “deep clean.” As our agent told us, “We want things to sparkle.” Of course.

What I’ve learned while deep cleaning my house is: how dirty my house was. Honestly, I’ve been astonished. How was I living in such filth without realizing it? Why didn’t I ever think to clean any of these nooks and crannies before? How come my friends continued to accept play date and dinner invitations to my home when it was in that condition? ….

June 27, 2020 Elizabeth

How to Refinish Your Hardwood Floors When Kids Live on Them

Keeping House

Or, How I kept children entertained outside the house for hours on end, for multiple days–including a rainy one–during a pandemic.

I’ll be upfront: If you really want to DIY refinish your hardwood floors, I highly recommend searching YouTube for how-to videos that will actually be helpful as far as the methods and materials you’ll need to use. But if your spouse is willing to do all the nitty gritty work, and you just need to keep the kids out of the way while he does, and you can’t go spend the week with relatives or in a hotel, because of a pandemic or anything else, then I might have some insight for you here!

I’ll begin halfway through, when my amazingly talented hubby admitted I was right about something for once….