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Last month we won 3 hours with a professional organizer, at Little Dude's PTA silent auction. I had never used a professional organizer before. I was pumped, and a little nervous. You never show an organizer that nicely organized sock drawer or the nifty pegboard in your garage. No. You show them your worst. This woman was going to see the dark, dusty, messy side of my world. And that is all of the PAPER we have been hauling around from apartment to house to different house to condo to apartment to house to current house (I am not kidding you).

So yesterday the brave Christa Lynn Mobley, of InnerLift Organizing, came to my study. There she is, to the right, sorting six boxes and two file drawers FULL of papers. Incredibly, she is even smiling. And she did not even flinch when she saw what I had waiting for her.

She suggested having laundry baskets ready for her to sort (BRILLIANT) and now I have two big baskets plus a box full of things to shred, plus another basket of things to recycle. On top of that she brought complete organization to the things we still need to hold on to, including an index to all of the files. They are all happily tucked away in my filing cabinet.

How long did this take her, you ask? Three days? No. Try THREE HOURS. Just three hours to sort through about 12 years of accumulated paper. 

"In awe" seems like an inadequate way to describe how I feel about that.

Last week I wrote about office spaces and asked if any of you were willing to share photos of your office space, as well as details on what you like and don’t like about your space. (more…)

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Thanks to Ray Vankleef for pointing me to photos of how someone made a little book igloo around a child’s bed in their room. (more…)

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Robert Cherry is a Koppelman Professor of Economics at Brooklyn College and a research associate at the Economic Policy Institute. His most recent book, Welfare Transformed: Universalizing Family Policies That Work, offers a range of strong suggestions for transforming successful welfare policies into universal family policies, from strengthening federal economic supports for working families to improving or community colleges. In the article below he reflects on the dichotomy between moral and fact-based judgments.

Having finally put to bed my book, Welfare Transformed: Universalizing Policies that Work, I have been enjoying the most leisurely summer in years, often finding myself watching reruns of “Judging Amy.” When I first watched it years ago, I admired the way it presented the tensions faced by professional women trying to balance motherhood, careers, and familial relations. This time, however, I was drawn to Tyne Daly’s character, Maxine Gray, and her resolve, as a social worker, in serving the best interests of the children and families she serves. (more…)

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I love my mom, but I’ve always thought of Mother’s Day as holiday promoted by the greeting card industry. Even as a mom myself, I just don’t get this whole thing. It’s nice to acknowledge our moms, of course, but the holiday is so loaded with saccharine expressions that are just a bit cheesy IMO. That said, I wanted to share two poems that I find meaningful on the subject of parents and parenting. One, “Warmth” is written by a child and the other “Grown Children,” is by New York Poet Laureate, Sharon Olds. Together, they have us looking ahead and looking backward…

Warmth
By Richard Furst
Grade 10

I walked through the empty kitchen
to the door,
to leave the warmth of home
for the bitter-cold anxiety of
a Monday at school.
Ducking the old dogwood outside,
I heard a familiar call,
and turned to see my mother
waving me off to school,
sending me a small fire
to keep my heart a little warmer.

From Ten-Second Rainshowers: Poems by Young People compiled by Sanford Lyne. Simon & Schuster, 1996.

And pair with Sharon Olds’ poem about “Grown Children” which begins observing a baby toddling on the beach and ends with the lines:

Grown Children
by Sharon Olds

… And now our daughter
is asleep on the couch, not six pounds
thirteen ounces, but about my size,
her great, complex, delicate face
relaxed. And our son, last night, looking closely
at his sweetheart as they whispered for a moment, what a tender
listening look he had. We raised them
daily, I mean hourly—every minute
we were theirs, no hour went by we were not
raising them—carrying them, bearing them, lifting them
up, for the pleasure, and so they could see,
out, away from us.

From The Unswept Room. Knopf, 2002.

Picture credit: rocksinmydryer.typepad.com