I’m Kind of in Love with an Organized Closet

I’ve never had one of those huge walk-in closets. I’ve always wanted one, but have never been lucky enough to have one of my own. It’s probably a good thing though, because I wouldn’t know what to do with all that space and would probably just have a ton of clothes that I don’t wear crowding along the racks.

In our townhouse, I had a closet in my bedroom AND a closet in the office.  So, I’d have all of my current season clothes in my room and all of the off-season stuff put away in the office closet. Now that we’ve moved, I’m back to having one closet. I could take over a closet in another room, but I’d rather just cut the clutter and become a bit more organized.

So if you’d like to join me, here are my tips to spring cleaning your closet:

Here’s my insane amount of boxes of off-season clothes. What’s funny is that I pretty much wear the same thing every day.

Take Everything Out of Your Closet & Drawers and Throw it on your Bed
And I mean everything – underwear, socks, t-shirts, jeans, work clothes… the whole kit and kaboodle (or kitten kaboodle if you’re a cat person). Then, I go and get my off-season bins of clothes and dump them on the bed too.

Spreading everything out into a great heap of mess does a couple things for you. First, if you’re like me you’ll look at the shear mass of crap you own and decide to get rid of a lot of it. Second, it makes it easier to get rid of stuff when it’s already thrown on your bed in a pile.

Take a Deep Breath and Get Ready to Purge              
Okay, now is where I usually bring in a trash bag and a couple of empty boxes. I also have the now empty off-season clothes bins to put things into for the next season.

Start Sorting
For each piece of clothing, you need to decide whether to keep it, throw it away, or donate it.

I ended up with two big boxes of clothes to donate and one bag of trash.

Ask yourself:

  • Is it in good condition?
  • Does it fit?
  • Does it look good on me?
  • Have I worn it within the last 2 years?

If the clothing passes the test, put it either in your drawer/closet for current season stuff, or in a labeled bin for off-season stuff. If it doesn’t pass the test then it goes immediately into the donation pile or trash bag.

Pat Yourself on the Back & Immediately Go to Goodwill
Yay, you’re done! Great job, you totally rock and now you’ll be able to reach into your closet and grab clothes that you will actually wear! Take all the plastic bins of off-season clothes and shove them under your bed or in another room’s closet.

Ahhh, an organized closet feels so good!

For the boxes of clothes that you’ve decided to donate – make a quick list of what each box contains so that you’ll be able to get a receipt back for your taxes. Then, load the boxes into your car and immediately take them to Goodwill, The Salvation Army, or your choice of places to donate them.

Trust me – DON’T WAIT and do it now. Otherwise, you’ll think it’s a good idea to go back through the box and pull stuff out that you’ve already decided to get rid of!

Pieces of Me

A few years ago I bought my husband a t-shirt that says, “Scars are like tattoos, but with better stories.” It was especially funny because my “type” of guy before I met him was the one who had tattoos and piercings. My husband, on the other hand, has not one bit of ink on him but lots of random scars from various accidents (including a very manly one where he flipped over the handlebars of his motorcycle on a racetrack).

Well, thankfully even though I’m not the most graceful girl on the block, I’ve never broken any bones (knock on wood). However, my list of scars just keeps adding up. I had surgery when I was a kid which left a faint scar on my neck. I fell out of a tree in elementary school and have a small scar under my arm. I had a cyst removed from my knuckle in high school which left a funny little arrow shaped scar. And lately, my dermatologist has been removing bits of me one piece at a time.

I’m not really sure why I decided to ask my dermatologist to do my first full body scan a few years ago. I’ve never been that good at using sunscreen and pretty much got a terrible burn at least once or twice a year. I was also a kid of the 80’s and never even bothered to apply SPF during my hundreds of hours in the pool for swim team practice. Even with these indicators, I felt like skin cancer couldn’t really happen to me.

So, on a whim at an appointment for something else, I asked the doctor to check out my moles. It was a little awkward – she had me bare a part of my body at a time so she could check me out. After that first review, she was concerned about two moles on my body. One between my toes (yeah, I know it’s very random) and one on the front of my right thigh.

I made an appointment to have the mole between my toes removed and I was super nervous about it. I mean, it sounded pretty darn painful and I didn’t want to end up with some weird looking foot with two toes fused together! I’m a girl and I love my pedicures and sandals! But I went through with it anyways and had the quick procedure to remove the spot. Honestly, the most painful part of it was the needles they used to numb the area. That hurt like a… um, rhymes with witch.

After the surgery was finished, she bandaged my toes up and I was instructed to come back two weeks later to have the stitches removed.

Two weeks later, I was anxious to have the stitches taken out and didn’t even think about the fact that the lab test was coming back. Sure enough, I was smacked in the face with the news that the mole contained pre-cancerous cells.

Holy crap.

Did she just say I had skin cancer??!!

Luckily the cells were still in the pre-cancer stage, but they were well on their way to becoming melanoma – the most serious form of skin cancer. However, they hadn’t turned into melanoma yet because randomly I decided to have my moles checked out and caught it early.

In order to be super cautious, the doctor suggested that once the wound fully heals, I go back in and have the scar removed to be sure that none of those icky cancer cells jumped away from the main mole.

As you can imagine, my stomach totally dropped to the ground to hear that I needed to have the exact same painful procedure that I was finally healing from. But I did it anyways. I mean, who the hell wants cancer on their foot? And if I didn’t catch it while it was still hanging out on my foot, it could move to my lymph nodes, liver or brain.

According to WebMd, the estimated 5 year survival rate for melanoma is:

  • 98% if cancer is found early and treated before it has spread.
  • 62% if the cancer has spread to close-by tissue.
  • 15% if the cancer has spread farther away, such as to the liver, brain, or bones.

So there was definitely incentive to go back in and have the additional procedure. Honestly, having the scar removed from my foot hurt even more than the first time because the skin was still sensitive from healing. Luckily the additional sample they took showed no signs of cancer, so I went along my merry way. Well, kind of – I also had the second mole on my thigh removed but it showed no signs of cancer so I was a-ok.

Fast forward a couple years. My scars pretty much healed up and you can’t really see them unless you look really close. And really, they’re like a badge of honor. Or at least a reminder to keep on top of my own health.

I went back to the dermatologist to get a prescription refill and she asked if I’d had a full body mole scan done within the past year. I hadn’t, so I told her to have at it. And she found two more sketchy-looking moles that she thought I should have removed.

I made the appointment to have the first mole removed a couple weeks later, but found out the very next day that I was pregnant with Jack. The doctor recommended that I wait until I was out of the first trimester to have the procedure, but I was super nervous about my baby falling out, so I waited until after he was born.

I went in two weeks ago and had a mole on the back of my left thigh removed. Yes, it hurt. And for some reason the wound was super itchy and red the entire time it was healing. I went back in on Monday to get my stitches out and found out that I’ve apparently developed an allergy to the Neosporin that I had been spreading on the scar.

I also found out that the mole contained pre-cancerous cells. This time even closer to melanoma on the spectrum of crappyness.

Luckily, they had taken the entire mole off instead of just a piece of it to test. Unluckily, they now want to go back in and remove the scar to make sure that they got all of those jackass cancer cells. And I’ll go through it again. And afterwards, I’ll have the other mole taken off that she was concerned about.

Because it is better to be safe than sorry.

Or I guess it’s more accurate to say it’s better to have scars than to have cancer.

Maybe I need to buy one of those shirts for myself – because any chance I get I’m going to tell the story of finding cancer before it’s too late. If I can influence just one person to go and have their moles checked, it will be worth it.

So I beg of you, if you haven’t had a full body scan at the dermatologist please make an appointment today. When you have a cancerous mole it doesn’t nudge you and say, “Hey dude, I have cancer.” It might not even look weird to you at all. It could be innocently sitting there on your skin waiting to spread its bastard little cancer cells all over your body.

Tips for Surviving the Sleepless Stage

One of those things about being a working mom is dealing with a lack of sleep.

While I was on maternity leave, if I didn’t get much sleep that night I’d grab a couple hours in the morning after my husband left for work. Ironically, that was the only time the Jack actually slept well… so I could snooze for enough time that I felt human for the rest of the day.

But what about when you go back to work?

sleepless stage

Your baby doesn’t really know or care that you’d really like some uninterrupted beauty sleep before going into the office. Case in point, even though Jack was doing really well and giving me a three hour stretch and a four hour stretch of sleep in between feedings, he decided this week that he wanted to be up every two hours.

Every. Two. Hours.

Do you know how much sleep you get when your baby wants to be fed every two hours? I’m going to go ahead and say that it was probably three hours TOTAL that night. And I had to wake up at 5:00 that morning to work a 12-hour day.

So, how do you do it?

Granted, I just started back at work last week but I’ve come up with a few tips that make my life without sleep go a bit smoother.

My Fabulous Tips to Survive without a Full Night of Sleep:

Look to the Future
Okay, last night sucked and you hardly slept at all. You’ve got a few more days of work left before finally getting to the weekend where you will be able to sleep in and/or take a much needed nap. It helps me to focus on the next time I WILL get to sleep, rather than complaining about the fact that I didn’t get any shut eye last night. So, if I have off the next day I just think, “Okay, I’ll get through today and sleep tomorrow.” Somehow it really does help!

Dress for Success
You just had a baby. Maybe your body immediately went back to its pre-pregnancy goodness, maybe not. Either way, you’ll probably need to put on some clothes that are a little nicer than what you’ve been wearing around the house for the last couple months. Go out and buy yourself a couple new things that make you feel pretty. On those mornings where you’re feeling like a zombie, somehow having something cute to wear makes it a little easier to drag your butt into the shower.

Caffeinate Yourself
Caffeine is your friend, use it. I’m talking about Starbucks goodness, Monster energy drinks, soda, etc. Anything that it takes to get you going! For me, it’s a grande caramel macchiato from Starbucks – I take a couple extra minutes in the morning to go through the Starbucks drive-through and it’s just the kick in the pants I need to stay awake on my hour-long drive into the office.

Like Where You Are Going
If you hated your job before you had a baby, going back to that same job after popping your little bambino into the world isn’t going to be any easier. Think back to your early 20’s about how hard it was to drag yourself into work or class after a Happy Hour that turned into an all-nighter. Um, okay maybe you might have to think back that far – but it really was painful, right? Except this time instead of having  a night of partying and making out with boys to make the hangover  worthwhile, you were up feeding a baby and doing that little bounce-sway-back-and-forth thing that all moms somehow know. If you actually like the job you’re going to and the people you’re working with, it really does make things a lot better to crawl into work with your baggy eyes.

Have a Support System
Okay, you did it. You survived your day and you’re about ready to collapse into a heap on the floor. Now is the time that you could really use that positive reinforcement from your spouse, friend, parent, significant other or dog. My husband is pretty great at telling me how awesome I am and how much he appreciates my hard work. If you don’t have someone to do the same, go find someone! You need a cheerleader if you’re going to get through this. Frankly, if you took care of your baby all night, worked all day, did your home stuff on top of that, and plan to do it all over again tomorrow – you’re Superwoman and don’t you forget it!

So what about you? Besides investing in a vat of under-eye concealer, do you have any tips to get through this period of not sleeping? Leave me a comment here or on my Facebook page!