12th day of Christmas, and 5th of the new year

Christmas Season Day 12:

Tonight is our annual Twelfth Night party, yay! The house is in pretty good shape. It needs to be decluttered of recycling (all the shipping boxes!) and garbage (wrapping paper! decluttering junk!), and I will put out of sight or put away the Christmas storage boxes, homeschooling and art stuff, and light clutter on horizontal surfaces. The kitchen and dining area just need to be set up for hospitality. The boys will clean the bathroom this afternoon.

Thanks to a good hour of work last night with the boys, the kids' playroom is clean, vacuumed, and has several fun, sturdy toys out and the rest in the closet, barricaded with the table!, ready for the hordes to descend tonight. Kids at an all-ages party are less supervised than kids at a playgroup, let's say. Last year was better, though.

As for food, I am taking it easy this year. Guests are encouraged to bring something to eat or drink, so I'm providing some easy, fun basics. We'll have my crockpot party meatballs, homemade Cuban bread, black-eyed pea salad if I find nice bell peppers, chips and salsa and bean dip, lots of fresh vegetables and ranch dip, maybe snack mix, soda and water and cranberry juice and beer and wine (maybe I'll set up mulled wine, maybe not), and a homemade flourless chocolate cake. All of that is very easy to do.

IF and only if everything is going smoothly by early afternoon, I'll mix up a batch of molasses crinkle cookies and let the boys make cookies this afternoon after cleaning the bathroom. Son1 is competent to handle the oven and hot cookie sheets; both boys love scooping the cookie dough, especially since they can try out our new Pampered Chef mini scoop. The cookies are a maybe, though. I would never consider it if I had to do it by myself, and that's the truth.

We're ready to finish out the Christmas season with a houseful of friends, food, laughter, good conversation, and all that good stuff.

New Year Day 5:

I showed a friend the in-the-midst-of-deep-reorganizing office and she wasn't suitably impressed. I guess it just looked differently cluttered to the uninformed eye (for now). I, on the other hand, see a clear and vacuumed floor; the desk and shelves (some new!) in great new locations; an in-the-midst paper sorting station; boxes of sorted objects ("keep," "give away," "elsewhere"); a pile of trash; a set of boxes of already-sorted resources for major projects; grocery bags of papers to be sorted; and, hidden to the eye, four file drawers to be emptied and readied for at least some of those papers.

My main office (and household management) issue is paper accumulation, can you tell?!? I did discover that there was an underlying organization that was pretty good, covered by a layer of "where do I put THIS?" papers that got out of control quickly. That's the obvious thing to tackle, and I need workable ways to sort/organize active papers and to file them when it's time.

I'll keep working on the office and the papers through the weekend, but not today.