Small Successes

It's my first Small Successes! That in itself should count as a success, because I love to participate of things like this; but I'll include it in my first item instead, which is:

1) I managed to get a blog going without it taking over my life! I have meant to write a blog for years but my biggest hold-up was my fear that I would put it too high up on my priority list, and more important things would suffer as a consequence. It's still something to guard against, but I'm really pleased to be here. If you are visiting, please say hello and look around!

2) I started swimming this week! My wonderful husband set up a membership at a local fitness center where he did some work, and he makes me go every evening. I can't describe the feeling of being back in the the water, cutting through it with those familiar motions, seeing the flags glide over my head as I approach the wall on the backstroke. I even feel it in my muscles the next day. Sore muscles are good.

3) This is not so huge as the first two. I'm almost embarrassed to count it as a success. But hey, it's all about celebrating the accomplishments, and as far as I still have to go, I'm going to count Tuesday's laundry. We have a fairly new laundry system that assigns two people to each day, and socks on Saturday. On each person's day, their clothes get washed and sent up to their room. The ideal is that they learn and eventually do their laundry themselves that day and take it from washing machine to dressers and closet. As it is right now, folding is haphazard and much of the laundry effort is spent sorting clean clothes from previous loads. But at least everybody has a basket for their clean stuff, everybody has a day their stuff gets clean, and if we get behind, there's a built-in plan to fall back on instead of me thinking, "How will I ever get all of this clean?" and beating myself up for missing a day.

And Tuesday, it worked pretty well. I filled everybody's clean clothes basket and folded a bunch myself. That includes several bedclothes, tablecloths and towels, which do not have an assigned day. I even put some away! (With eight kids, I don't do the putting-folded-clothes-away thing. :-) )

What are your successes this week?