We believe what you put on your body is as important as what you put in your body.
I am not going to keep you in suspense.
The order form wasn’t in Abby’s room either.
Is there an evil Girl Scout Fairy who visited my house? I’m trying not to worry, but I know this means I have to walk Ari back to a few house and try to figure out some orders. Ugh… Chuck will tell you I hate admitting it when I make a mistake. Please don’t ask for stories though.
The upside?
Abby’s room went from this:
To this:
I’m 99.5% sure the Girl Scout Cookie order form was NOT in Ari’s room. I know this because there is very little in Ari’s room right now. There is a small chance it is stuck in between something but I have little hope. Next, on to Abby’s room (she is notorious for taking stuff and stashing it somewhere you wouldn’t think to look).
Ari’s room this morning:
And after 3.5 hours, here is what you would see now:
… and that’s because it is all here:
My plan is that when Ari comes home she can pick 150 things to keep and everything else will disappear somehow. Am I a mean Mom? I can’t see that she needs all of this stuff!
This year I have TWO Girl Scouts, one a new Junior and the other a new Daisy. So of course, we’re selling Girl Scout Cookies; practically FORCING loved ones to buy them. Each girl has an order form and with our neighbors and fellow Girl Scouts L & B, we went door-to-door and took turns selling. It was great!
But it couldn’t last. Sometime between Monday 9/17 and Thursday 9/20, Ari’s order form went MISSING! I really thought a 9 year old could take care to put it on the counter where all of the other Cookie stuff was, but it is gone. We have retraced our steps to the point of talking though a TV-crime-show-type backtrack of events. Ari claims she put it on the counter near the microwave OR the stove 9/17. The next day (she thinks) she took it to another room and perused it while sitting on a beanbag chair and then returned it to the kitchen. She CLAIMS it never went upstairs to her room.
In the past two weeks I have moved lots of heavy furniture, swept in places that haven’t been swept since 2009, and even looked under the cabinets in the kitchen (IKEA cabinets with feet and removable baseboards). Not a clue has turned up.
Now for the plan. Tomorrow I will be home because Abby is STILL sick (temp currently 103.1) so it is my turn to stay home with her. I made a list of jobs for tomorrow. It is fairly short, but I’m hoping it will produce results:
To translate for those of you who aren’t teachers and therefore can’t read scribble, it says:
By clean out I mean, remove everything and put it back in later. I don’t know how it will go, but if you’ve seen their rooms you can guess it can’t get worse. This is a new strategy in my war against scary rooms (and missing order forms).
Update: Ari’s room is cleaned out. No order form was found.
We finally gave in. Ari and I walked around to all of our neighbors who bought from us and asked what they had ordered. Everybody was very nice about it and the consensus is that we will find it any day now. We are still waiting on one order – our neighbor had a friend house-sitting and he ordered two boxes. I think it is was Samoa and a Thin Mint, but I’m not 100% sure.
That does leave another problem though. I spent the last week looking for the darn order form so the other house chores didn’t really get done. Ari and Abby’s room is clean, but basically he rest of the house is a wreck (don’t believe me? Ask my Dad – he visited Thursday). So today I began to fix it. I worked on the guest bedroom, having Ari go through the stuff in there and we recycled and threw away a lot, and we have a bag of giveaways too. I have worked a bit on the rest of the house, but it is overwhelmingly disorganized and I am not so great at getting it back in order.
And it brings another problem to light. My “desk” is the dining room table. You can probably guess the problem with this now that you know I am not well organized. On good days, I occupy the far end of the table on one side, with my laptop and a pile of papers that I need to use or go through to file. On a bad day… it takes me 15 or more minutes to clear off enough room for four people to eat dinner at the table.
A few weeks back I decided I needed a bookcase so I could clear off my bedside table (I had 50-60+ books on it). I scored a really nice bookcase on Freecycle and took care of that problem and now it is evident I need a desk too. It will be a place I can make various piles (my organization method of choice) and they will be left alone, rather than have to be consolidated into one pile every night for dinner. Hopefully someone can send me “desk vibes” and I can score something awesome one Freecycle in the coming weeks!
And yes, the “final” part of this debacle will be when I find the order form!