Home Mastery

Lately, I have been considering book shelving options as I am bored with plain bookshelves where you only see the spine. I secretly found myself longing for display shelves like those we had at Kindergarten all those many years ago.

As it turns out you will always find someone who has thought the same thing for themselves and can point you to a range of answers. There were several very cool bookshelves that I came across in my search. Like the tree that was turned into paper which was then recycled to make a tree-shaped bookshelf to hold more trees which had been turned into paper.

Image source: http://designartist.cafe24.com/web/open_product/big/tree1.jpg

Then there was one bookshelf that looked somewhat normal other than the adult silhouette that would allow someone to shuffle into the shelf itself to read. I wanted to buy it just put against my living room window with a curtain that hides me in my own nook looking out across my front garden as if I was the only person in the world. It is such a great idea!

So, as I hunted it became clear that all the great ideas were used in children's bedrooms. (Apparently, we grow out of being attracted to books by their cover). The solutions that a friend pointed me towards was the use of PVC gutters as a display shelf which is kind of nifty.
Image source: http://familyfun.go.com/

So, I have now seen dozens of pictures showing them in children's play areas:

Image source: http://www.mamanotes.com/

To fitting them into shared bedrooms:

Image source: http://raisingolives.com/ - Rain Gutter Book Shelves Tutorial

But what I hope to see is one long shelf in the Master Bedroom spanning the entire wall above the top of the bed head. I have even had a look at the Philmac web site to look at what my style options are. What do you think?

..no, I lie. But it sounded better than 'it started when a child pulled out eight toy boxes'. That's where it really started. I was just in the process of explaining that this was not okay when, ironically, his Occupational Therapist called to see how he was doing. (Let's just say the call was cut short when he started throwing toys around).

So, we did a prompt clean away of toys as a family and I put lunch on. With an egg cracked for each child on the grill I thought about cracking one for myself (which is an unusual thing for me to eat). Clearly, eggs are something I am not meant to be consumed as that fourth egg was rotten and it was a mad dash to get it off the grill before it contaminated the other eggs. (Fried rotten egg smells totally disgusting for the record). I felt ill.

Well, the kid's eggs got away unscathed and were plated with rice and vegetables. It was ready to serve when I found that another child had found store-bought tomato sauce (that did not belong to us) and had managed to spill it from the entranceway, through the formal lounge across the carpet runner and up the stairs including pouring it onto the wall and splashing it on doors also. What a mess!

It was a day I had dedicated to getting the house clean that turned into a day dedicated to not letting the house become any more untidy than it was at the end of the day. Thankfully, with the changing of the goal posts I survived the day.

Finally! I have finished re-establishing Baby Steps Resources as a taxonomy driven web site (on the most part). Hopefully people will now be able to easily find the Green Cleaning Resources as well as the more recent Recipe Section.

Next job is to pin a contact of mine down to see whether Baby Steps Resources can have a reproduction agreement for some of the content being developed for Green & Nutty. It would be sweet if we could find some common ground there.

One must be suspicious when the house is quiet of a day but night time and sleeping children comes around it is the time when I get to relax and work on my own pet projects (somewhere between housework and dawn). Tonight I have given Baby Steps Resources a thorough review. It has been one project of mine that has been quite neglected, barring Shrouded Geek's upgrades, over the past year and it was time to give it some work on structure to make contributing to it just a little easier. I hope to have the structural changes completed later *yawn* today but bed is calling at this moment in light that I need to be at a session with my trainer in less than seven hours.

The good news is that Baby Steps Resources will have purchasable resources sometime into the future which will be great! Just negotiating on pricing at the moment and I am looking forward to it.

Well, I certainly have been busy this weekend with Baby Steps. Why?

I got sufficiently annoyed with the squashing of my posts on a parenting forum. They are now commercial to the point where my putting a link to the Playtime! sessions that are run by my church for the local community is considered a threat.

In addition, the moderator who removed it didn't even give me the courtesy of contacting me to let me know. It was a poor choice really as the whole point was to make just some of the activities that we run in the sessions available free to the wider community. It is sad that commercialism gets to the point where nett public benefit is lost.

Hmm ... anger can be a good motivator!