On Top Of Things

My mother believes I’m just like her in that I always stay on top of things.   In a way, I am, but I’m also not.   I think I have some of my mother and father in methodology in certain areas.   For example, my father is a collector.  He loves to collect all sorts of things.   His collections are always interesting and consist of things most people wouldn’t collect.

I collect things.  I have quirky collections.  My father has a basement in the house I grew up in  (that my parents still live in in the winter months).   My father would buy all sorts of things at yard sales and things would pile up in the basement, in the shed, in the basement of the rental house they had, in the storage unit.   At times when I was a child there would be a path you had to walk through in the basement.   My father is not a hoarder though—his collecting was not out of control and he would go through and organize and clean out things from time to time.   The basement was one of the most interesting places in the house to me as a child.

My mother never had anything out of order.   She had a few small collections, but they were small in size and number and weren’t overtaking in any way.   I’m like my mother in that I collect in an orderly fashion and my collections are always organized.

But then there’s paperwork.   My mother likely never paid a bill late and always filed everything in the appropriate folder as soon as she paid the bill.   I dislike paperwork.  I don’t want to do it.   So I procrastinate.   In this way I’m a lot like my father.   He waits until the very end to do things sometimes, like (I think) taxes.  My mother has her taxes ready for the statements to come in the mail and I would bet she could win the prize for “First Client With Their Taxes In” at their accountant’s ten years running now—if only she didn’t have to wait for my father to get his part completed...

So I do things in batches.   I do like having everything done and caught up, but I don’t like doing emails, paperwork, bills, etc.   Today I got a section of things caught up that I got behind on while we were on vacation.   I could have gotten some things done on vacation, but the bottom line is, I didn’t wanna.

So, I have to go file after I post this.   On the upside, I don’t have a pile of papers to look at and be annoyed by anymore.

The Big Boy Update:  My son got upset about doing homework today.   He has to do some over the summer and we’ve gotten behind because of vacations.   I took a new tactic on him today when I heard him yelling (wailing? negotiating? arguing? pleading?) with his father.   I called down from the second floor where I was working that he was disrespecting his father and if I heard one more thing out of him (I said some consequence at this point but I don’t remember what it was right now).   That angle worked.   My husband stepped out of the situation for a bit and when he came back my son was much more respectful.   Parenting, it’s so trial and error.

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:  My daughter came in this morning and asked me to remind her how to make the water bomb base and the preliminary fold (two of the most common bases in origami).   She had made the folds, but she couldn’t get the paper to collapse into the square or triangle.   Both bases are the same four folds, each side of the paper collapses to a different base.   I showed her how to cup her hands and let the paper fold up for her.   Now that she has those two bases, she can make up lots of folds or learn models I teach her based on them.   Next step: the water bomb itself—a model you get to blow up into a ball.   I think she’ll love that.