With all of this public outdoor space nearby, and having focused much of our home-front attention on setting up our indoor environment over these last several months (come on in for a tour of Kaspar’s room), we’ve only recently turned our gaze to our own little backyard. It’s small—about eleven by twenty feet—but it has potential; it extends off of our window-walled home office, and is surrounded by a tall fence, so it feels like an additional room with plenty of privacy and an extra awesome ceiling (sunsets, anyone?). At the moment, it’s basically a Rectangle-O-Dirt, with some patchy grass poking through. But Kaspar’s insisted on playing out there a lot lately, and I’ve been having visions… of a garden, a breakfast table, a clothesline. Maybe even compost. Definitely some fun stuff for the little man. Like bunnies! Okay, bunnies are a step too far. No bunnies. But the rest I think I can do. And the babyman part— well, that’s where you come in.

With that in mind, I noticed the shelves of children’s music CDs at the library the other day (read: Kaspar single-handedly un-shelved about two hundred children’s CDs at the library the other day), and thought while thumbing through them (read: attempting to re-shelve them, alphabetically) that perhaps I should expose him to some of whatever’s out there that’s been made specifically for kids. 

As we get to the bottom of Kaspar’s allergy stuff (slash wait for him to outgrow the bulk of it), knowing that our home environment is clean and safe for him is reason enough to bring in the pros. But seriously, I feel like I’ve discovered the land of milk and honey, mama-style, irrespective of weird baby allergy problems. We’ll still do our maintenance cleaning, but to get the serious-business, deep-clean taken care of for us once a month while we go have fun together as a family, instead of spending a weekend exhausting ourselves with this chore (and yielding only mediocre results), is my idea of awesome.