Sunlight in My Universe

Recently we’ve made a change in the Case de Dewchild. We removed the baby gate from the hallway.
If you’ve spent any amount of time in our house you know which gate. Yes, THAT gate. The one that you couldn’t figure out how to work until Connor came up and showed you. The gate that always squeaks and wobbles like it’s going to fall right off of the wall. The gate that catches your purse as you walk by, the gate that grabs your jacket. The one that Jorma has racked himself self on twice of that I know for sure and the same gate that left a black bruise the size of a quarter on his thigh. Because this is the hell we endure to have a kid free room, the office.
Now beating the hell out of us was one thing, but the day that Tristan waddled over with a knot precisely the size of a nickel on his head, precisely in the place where the catch on the gate door hit him, we were done. That son of a bitch was coming down.
Now just so you know why we’ve kept that gate up… the hallway is around 48” wide. Try finding a baby gate for less than $100.00 that will fit that. There are some that go to 48” but it has to be exactly 48” and well, ours is actually 48.25”. So that’s why we had the crappy gate to begin with. We I didn’t want to spend a bunch of money that we didn’t have.
We took the gate down, which means we had to clean up the office and make it a little more child friendly since we blocked off the stairs only and the kids have run of the rest of the house. In order to clean up the desk in the office, we first had to find somewhere for all of that crap to live. So I cleaned out the pie safe that holds well, other junk that was living in there because it didn’t have anywhere to live. So, we moved said junk upstairs, or into the downstairs coat closet (which also had to be cleaned out) desk junk to pie safe, added some outlet covers and child locked the CPU door on the desk. We had to pass word protect the system, to keep the kids from moving folders on the desktop to the trash or forwarding random emails to people, but other than three days or re-organizing it wasn’t much work.
Just taking the gate down, unlocked some sort of crazy chi flow through the house and now it feels more like a house. The office is actually cleaner now than it ever was when it was kid free because we can’t have crap laying all of the desk. I love being able to walk from the office to the kitchen hands free. It has improved everyone’s quality of life.

Everyone has those things. The things that bug the crap out of you, those little things that you mean to get fixed or change or whatever needs to be done but never do. So, my challenge to you is, do that one little thing that’s been driving you nuts. Cut that hangnail, replace that paper towel holder. If you can’t remember what that thing is, next time you are reminded, vow then and there to do something about it. Change your world.