Here we go back to the mayhem of everyday life. I really wish I could do something about how overcommitted I am, but it’s not me, it’s Atti. He’s getting bigger and stronger every day, but he’s still fairly significantly delayed, so he requires a ton of care, and that requires a ton of organization.
I’m sure every family has a master calendar somewhere in their house. One spot where everyone knows that if the event isn’t posted, it will be completely forgotten about. With just me and Bear and no soccer games to shepherd anyone around to, I never had to worry about family organization, and I naively assumed that I’d have a few years before my son needed his own personal assistant. But since I was wrong, I had to come up with a way to put up a big fat calendar without creating a total eyesore.
I hated the thought of so carefully painting and decorating only to put up an enormous paper thing that would get progressively more tattered looking. I went and bought myself a big desk calendar, and then got an open back frame from Michaels, but any frame store offers them. The calendar was just a bit bigger than a convenient frame size, and it would have cost about $60 to custom frame it, so I just cut the top of the calendar off and stapled the pages together at the sides. Then I placed the calendar inside and held it in place with a couple of nails pounded into the frame right behind the cardboard backing of the calendar.
When I need to look forward a few months, the pages pull right out from behind the frame, and then you can just tuck them back inside to keep the whole thing looking neat and trim.
This is a crazy simple idea, and I’m sure I’m not the first person to come up with it, but it made me feel like maybe I can manage to venture out into motherhood without sacrificing *all* of my design tastes to my tiny little drooling tyrant.