This weekend we have decided to do something very frightening. We are hosting 4 8-year old girls for a slumber party. Our daughter will make the 5th. She’s turning 9 on tuesday and rather than have a big party at an ice rink, or other venue, we scaled waaay back this year. Except now I’m scared. Will these girls sleep? Will they let me sleep? Will they know (or care) how mean I get when I’m tired?? Will I be able to make pancakes on 2 hours of sleep?

And can someone answer me why after vacuuming for an hour, the second I turned off the vacuum, I saw half a dozen pine needles on the floor? Where do they multiply and why does it seem to take half the year to be finally rid of them?

So wish me luck. The girls will have pizza, decorate cupcakes, put on mud masks, dance their brains out and watch a movie. And hopefully sleep…

To all the deserving moms out there…Happy Mother’s Day!

This is a vintage hankie I found last weekend that I’m adding to my collection. Isn’t it sweet?

I passed this interesting installation walking down Metropolitan Ave. in Williamsburg Brooklyn. I think it would be amazing if everyone grabbed a tree and added it to the installation to make a whole hanging forest. It’s in a particularly ugly empty space under the highway, which could use some beautification.

When does being frugal turn into hoarding? I keep coming back to this question lately.

Both my husband and I tend towards being pack rats. I think it’s my European roots, but I hate throwing perfectly good things away. It just seems so wasteful. We both like to hang on to things that we think may be of use down the road. We don’t have drawers of used nails, or twist-ties, but things get crowded quickly when you live in a small space.

We have a technique we use to get rid of “perfectly good” junk. We hang it on the fence outside our apartment building and usually within minutes it is taken. It makes me feel good that that item isn’t being carted off to a landfill. But we still have clutter. We don’t have stacks of newspapers piled up on our floor, but we do keep a section to use to start our bbq. I don’t have mountains of craft supplies, but I usually have what I need to start a project on a whim. I am slowly trying to weed out books we haven’t read in years, but I like to hang onto my reference books (canning, chicken keeping, cooking, nature guides, etc.)

I can’t figure out how to live with less stuff without throwing things out and then having to re-buy them later. Certainly the obvious answer is to not buy things later. Learn to live with less stuff. See The Story of Stuff, which is a great video. Having a kid adds to this stuff exponentially. My daughter is constantly being given gift bags at parties and school, which are filled with cheap plastic toys. This stuff makes my skin crawl because it is fodder for landfills. Zerowastehome’s blog details how she has taught her children to refuse these things. I admire her, but I’m not quite there yet.

I know I hang on to things for sentimental reasons as well, but  I think that’s what makes a house a home. Personal items that mean something to you. A friend of mine who has a very uncluttered home once said to me that she would come here to help me de-clutter. She would hold something of mine up, I would tell her the story about it, and then she would throw it away.

And, honestly I know I’m not a hoarder. I had a relative who was and it goes far, far beyond having a messy or cluttered home. It’s just in reading about the approaches psychologists use to help change the behavior of hoarders that I see similarities:

• Make more reasonable judgments when deciding if an object is worthy of keeping or not.
• Learn how to make quick decisions on whether to keep an object or toss it.
• Practice discarding items while sorting through the intense emotions they trigger.

Contrary to what you might think, Greenwood Cemetery in Brooklyn is a lovely place to spend a fall afternoon. We decided to go there this weekend to see if we could find any hen-of-the-woods mushrooms. These mushrooms grow under oak trees in the fall, and I thought there would be many old oaks there. I was right, but the place offered so much more.

We saw the fabled monk parrots when we first arrived. Their story is that escaped from a container at Kennedy airport and have taken up residence at Greenwood. You can see photos of them here.

We actually saw very few mushrooms considering the vast quantities of rain we’ve had. There were a few hen-of-the-woods, but they were old and woody and uprooted. I think the groundskeepers are too efficient to let big mushrooms grow there. But the day was beautiful and it was like walking in a lovely park.