Our garage looks like it belongs to a house where grownups live. It's so strange to open the door into the garage and see cement. And to be able to put my finger on exactly what I'm looking for without spending an hour hunting for it. If we don't watch out, we're going to end up bona fide.

I organized and de-cluttered Joey's art cubby which happens to be in the family room. I do this every few months when the papers start to constitute a fire hazard. Joey is a prodigious artist--she spends at least an hour a day drawing. You can imagine how much paper we go through. And she is physically and emotionally unable to throw away any paper that she has drawn so much as a smily face. As a result, we end up with piles of pictures, all of which we cannot possibly keep and which eventually spill out of the cubby on the family room floor and into a corner. I have to be merciless keeping only a fraction of her pictures for her art book. She has learned to just leave the room when I'm cleaning it out because it just kills her to see babies go into the trash.

Ed installed a cupboard over the dryer in the laundry room that I've needed for storage for a long time. I finally have room for the beautiful pumpkin-shaped soup tureen and matching pumpkin-shaped soup mugs. And I put my juicer in there since I rarely use it but don't want to give it away. And I put my sushi sets there that were a gift from my in-laws for Christmas last year. They're beautiful and I love them but use them very rarely and I'd rather use the kitchen cupboard space they were occupying for things I need to access more frequently. I was able to move my blender, which I do use often, into the juicer spot so it will be much easier to get to. All this organization is almost dangerous.

We rearranged our furniture in the living room. I love it. We put the dining room table into the breakfast nook and decided to ditch having a dining room since it's not an actual room, just an area that could be better served with a small bistro table (which formerly inhabited our nook) and our couch. Since the arrival of our piano, the living "room" (a living area, actually) has felt rather crowded. Now there's lots of room. We rarely ate in the dining "room" anyway. I bet we ate there about 5 times a year and every time it has been casual enough that the nook would have served just fine if the table had been bigger. Now we can comfortably seat 6 in the nook and if we ever have more than 6 for dinner, we'll set up a utility table in the family room.

Now I'm feeling all decoraty. I was looking around the house thinking of things I wanted to get or make for the living room and for the plant ledges, starting with a rug to better define the conversation area between the couch and chair-and-a-half.

I have this naive notion that I live like a grown-up and then I go to a real grown-up's house and I realize that I'm just pretending. A real grown-up would not have a huge wall in the living room with absolutely nothing on it. A real grown-up would not have a garage as cluttered as mine was. A real grown-up has curtains on the windows, over the blinds. (I kid myself that I really like that "spare" look. We're minimalists, after all, except where the garage is concerned.) A grown-up woudn't use metal folding chairs for kitchen chairs (but they're padded and very comfortable and I like to sit on them--doesn't that count for something?). A grown-up wouldn't have dust bunnies the size of small children under bed and couches. A real grown-up would clean the shower before the floor turns pink. I try. Sorta. But I'm clearly not a real grown up. Not yet. Perhaps I can use the college student excuse for a few more years. Maybe I should whip up a shelving unit out of cinderblocks and particle board planks just to reinforce that notion.

--L