John pulled himself to standing and cruised a few steps yesterday on Dan’s computer tower in his office. He’s racing around the house crawling. The topology of our house makes this very fun because a complete circle is possible by going through the hallway to the bedroom and to the living room and back into the hallway again.

Unfortunately, the kitchen is currently off-limits because of a chicken waste spill that happened right before we needed to leave for a potluck. I have not yet decontaminated the whole kitchen. Since things were already bad, I decided to clean the whole kitchen... now you can barely walk in it. I’ve purged the fridge of spoiled leftovers and am clean its interior. Somehow, mountains of dishes have accumulated (I think that is what happens when your sink gets full - you can’t clean anything and then it all piles up) so I’m running the dishwasher currently. I hope to finish this episode by tomorrow afternoon.

To motivate myself, I’ve been setting the timer when I go into the kitchen.

“OK - Emily, you don’t need to be intimidated. Just clean for 15 minutes and you’re free to do something else.”

If I felt like I had to finish the task when I went into the kitchen, I’d never go in! But usually, after my 15 minutes are through, I set the timer again for five or ten more minutes and clean happily away. One thing making this task especially hard is that I can't really do dishes when John is sleeping because the dishes noise wakes him up.

Unfortunately, Dan and I decided to work on a hard Sudoku last night after my first cleaning session... I never got to a second one!