Seasonal defective disorder

I was so proud of myself this week. I started shopping for a Halloween costume for my son a full 6 days before Halloween. I trotted off to The Children's Place in my lunch hour at work, where I'd got his costume last year. I was surprised to find there were very few costumes left. How could this be? Was 6 days early in fact late? Catapulting headlong into the next season I asked tentatively if they had any winter boots. Sold out. Pardon? It was almost 2 months before winter began!

I expressed my incredulous to some other moms in the office and they just gave me withering looks. They had completed their Halloween shopping by October 1. They already had winter boots for their children.

I like to warm up to a holiday, I like to give the rampant materialism time to wash over me before I commit to any purchases. I don't want to be shopping for Halloween costumes when it's still hot out and I certainly don't want to be shopping for winter boots any earlier than I have to. Fall is a time to rejoice in the denial that winter is around the corner.

Is there anyone who hasn't got it together yet to get their Halloween purchases? If you're lookig for a costume for your child, there are a few left at The Children's Place reduced from $24.50 to $4.99 for the disorganized and the cheap. Happy Halloween!

Can't get enough of orgaporn

Remember when people started bandying around the word gastroporn? Apparently it was first coined in a Globe and Mail article by Joanne Kates. I know I'm a gastroporn fiend, Food channel, cookbooks, glossy mags, whatever I can get my hands on.

But now a new kind of porn strikes my fancy - orgaporn. The voyeuristic pleasure of watching homes, shelves, closets, etc. get organized is a guilty pleasure I can't get enough of. And there's plenty around to satisfy my cravings. Shows like Home made Simple or Mission Organization are about as vanilla as you can get. Martha kicks it into high gear with no messing around. And if I'm feeling sadistic I watch Hoarding: Buried Alive.

For my daily fix I subscribe to I'm an Organizing Junkie. I too want to live "a life of simplicity and orer" and for 10 minutes a day I succomb to this wild fantasy, in the comfort of my office chair Going for a peep now...

Haunted by nut-crusted fish

I should really have nut-crusted fish in my freezer. I've been reading recipes on Weelicious and educating myself on what healthy toddler should be eating. I even put the nut-crusted fish recipe in my recipe box. I'm hoping one day I get as far as making it.

Does anyone else find the whole concept of meal-making pretty challenging? I don't know how people put three squares on the table every day of the week! We give our almost 2-year old son Xavier relatively healthy food most of the time, but not in meal form. Tonight it was crackers and cream cheese, with pineapple and chunks of apple followed by a Kinder surprise egg (a moment of weakness on my part).

Getting a hot meal in our house is rare because cooking with a toddler around is challenging.  Xavier is big on the pre-meal snack which holds things up. He's also big on grabbing full cartons of eggs from the fridge,dumping boxes of pasta and hurling things out of the dishwasher. So meal preparation has been, shall we say, streamlined.

A few fish  fillets nutted and bagged might get us on track to healthy eating and make me feel like a super mom. Maybe that will be my project for the weekend.

Trouser trappings

Trousers stress me out immensely. It took me years before I gave up worrying about whether my ass looked fat or my thighs chunked out, but do you think now I can relax? Now I have to worry about perfect pant length.

All sorts of people, with full-time jobs who cook and clean on a regular basis, also find time to hem their trousers to appropriate ground-skimming length. Because if the millimetre precision is off there'll be snickers.

While this seemed like a rigid world view, it got downright despotic when it dawned on me that shoes had to fall into hemline for ever more. I thought for a while that maybe I was overthinking it. But I wasn't. I was underthinking it. Clearly. Read the rules here. 

Youlookfab.com tells us that "You need to commit to a length. You won’t be able to wear the same pair of pants with your ballet flats and your high heels. You’ll need to have an assortment of pant lengths if you have an assortment of heel heights." How do you know which your high heel pants will be when you buy them? How do you remember? Is there some closet coding I don't know about?

I don't know how people do it.

Chatting on the couch...

Two of my oldest friends came over a while back for a chat. We've been friends for decades so we're as comfortable as a tea cosy and a pair of socks. We just slumped on the couch, shoulders curled, slowly chatting away. I probably put out snacks, but I'm pretty sure I didn't make them dinner.

Whatever the topic turned to, it usually ended with "I don't know how people do it." We were marvelling at the lives of others - not those who became political leaders or heart surgeons or lugers, they were too far out of scope to dwell on, but those insouciant folks who worked a day job, cooked a meal and kept their houses clean. We didn't know how they did it.

I can't seem to do all those three things in any given day with any sort of success. How is it possible? But every day I hear of people doing it. In fact, everyone's claiming they do. Commuting, computing, dinner and dusting. Really?

If you're doing it, I'd love to hear how. Please be as detailed as possible.