So it's weird.. I have a lot of "anniversaries" in the last quarter of the year.
last week we celebrated (using that term VERY loosely) our 1 year anniversary of leaving Madison and moving to CT.
This week we celebrate (again loose use of the word) our FIVE year anniversary of leaving Seattle.
Our wedding anniversary - 7 years - is at the end of this month.... (I don't have any wedding photos on my computer.... 7 years is a long time in the world of technology.)
AND I was just cleaning out some things (more on that later) and came across some old paperwork. There are a lot of new people here and I'm quite sure you haven't gone back to read my OLD OLD blog posts, but we did IVF to get pregnant (and if you care to know WHY) and I just dug up our paperwork ... Oct 18th I went into the hospital to have two tiny embryos place inside me! On Oct 28th (FIVE years ago) I found out I was pregnant! WOW! Looking over the paperwork with the words Blastocyst and embryos written all over them I feel a strange disconnection from it. When we decided to do IVF I always wondered if we would tell any resulting children how they were brought into this world. That question is still unanswered, but I rarely think about it. Now that I'm on 'the other side' I don't even feel like we went through all of that.. and believe me WE DID! It was a long hard road to get where we are, but it's like it was all erased from my memory when Jason and Lily joined our family. If you know anyone going through this infertility business. Give them a big hug, an ear and a shoulder. That's really all the need. Well, not all, but you get it.
I am working on simplifying some things.. all things.. in preparation for a big training year. Part of that is cleaning things out and letting go of the 'unnecessary' things (which lead me to purge the aforementioned paperwork) and streamlining our finances (aka squeezing out any extra cash I can to support my crazy triathlon habit). I can't remember where I found it, but I stumbled upon Zen Habits. I am really loving this site. It's got all kinds of info about creating your 'zen'.. from ridding yourself of extra stuff (aka baggage) to simplifying your finances. I'm just gobbling up this site (and a lot of time.. not so zen or simplified, but we'll get there).
Are you in need of some simplifying and cleaning out of things? What do you do to keep it simple stupid? I'm excited to get rid of the unnecessary stuff to allow more room for the good stuff, brain space for more creativity and less of that bogged down feeling from all the 'stuff' I've got to manage.
PS. Hot tip from a friend of mine. If you donate stuff to Goodwill they have a brochure that helps you give value to the things you donate. This brochure gives way more value to things than I had given in the past. If you itemize on your taxes this is very cool. You have to list every item, but it might be worth the extra work.
