One of my goals while on mat leave is to re-organize our very small abode so it's less cluttered and more manageable for when I go back to work. I have come to realize that I must have less stuff in order to feel more organized, and so much of the stuff is superfluous anyway.

In my case, the extra stuff -- well, a lot of it is books, and books .... it's hard for me to get rid of books. Very hard. They are old friends, these books, they speak to who I am and where I have come from and I love them, so many of them. I like the fact that I own five English dictionaries, because I remember the getting of each of them -- inherited from a friend, found in university when I couldn't afford one, etc. etc.

But with children come many sacrifices, and one of those sacrifices is to go through the books, at the very least, and get rid of the ones that aren't friends so as to free up more space for the kids' things. And so I have. I have about $100 in credit at the nearby used bookstore (couldn't take cash. Now I can get more books! Don't tell me this is illogical, I don't want to know.) And today I spent some time re-organizing the bookshelves, placing them in alphabetical order, lovingly repositioning and placing and remembering each one.

It's extraordinary how much pleasure I get from the books -- even beyond reading them, just having them and holding them and looking at them and organizing them. Sigh. It might just be a sickness.

But I wouldn't be writing this out unless I suspected that at least one or two people who might read this might feel exactly the same way.

;)