SpoonFullofJelly

Three months ago I could barely pull a sweater from my shelf without getting plummeted by a pile of clothes. I threw everything to the floor in frustration and headed to my dresser. I tried to pull out a shirt from a drawer, but four more came with it. I grunted in frustration. Since when did I have so many clothes? I went to college with three suitcases, lived over seas with two suitcases and took those same two suitcases to Chicago for my masters degree. I know I have been in the tundra for the past four and half years, but where did all these clothes come from? It is time to Declutter! There are tons and tons of videos that show you how to organize here  and here , but organization is not my problem. Quantity is my problem. I want less stuff. So I skipped the idea of organizing and started purging. I began in the kitchen. I got rid of extra dish towels. We can recycle fabric in my city and so all extra, torn and even missed matched towels were tossed. I have 8 place ...

Summer is in full swing and so is the relaxation around the Maruki household. We usually welcome July with a camping trip and this year doesn’t disappoint. This year we will camp out at a county park for 5 days. We visited this park two years ago, and liked it. Maybe it was quite because we were there at the end of August. Nonetheless, we will return and it’s the first time we have camped this long together. Over the years, Hubby has totally fallen in love with camping. It has been a way for us to escape the city, paperwork and requirements. We are car camping at the moment. We will get more into backpack camping in the future. If your family has not tried camping before I highly recommend it.  Camping takes on many forms-intermediates and experts have battling opinions on “real” camping advice. To me, if I slept on the ground, ate over a fire and gotten a mosquito bite then I was camping. Camping has been our playground for trying new methods of living and heal...

Open adoption has become a sore spot in my family. For those that are new to my corner of the blog world, welcome. I'm Lauren Maruki and I have been writing about all the bumps in my road from living and travelling internationally to infertility and now adoption of our first child. Hubby and I both have adopted cousins. Hubby's cousins are now adults, and mine are all under the age 12. Open adoption was a topic of discussion a couple weeks ago at a family event. To our surprise, my mother discovered that my cousins do not have an open adoption with their birth family. I had wondered if that door was shut. Now I am wondering if it was accidentally shut or purposefully shut. I want an open adoption. I want to continue to learn not only about the birth mother, but the birth father, the birth grandparents, the aunts, the uncles and all the crazy cousins. Those people make up my child. Those people have traits that my child will possess. The traits will be the key to perso...