Coming into this late, but I feel your pain. I'm currently a SAHM with two kids (three and seven) and I'm drowning. But this is what I've learned in the past 8 years with two kids and a DH who didn't know the right end of a vacuum when I married him... Decrease your clutter. I know that this is terribly hard to do, but decrease it. Get what you can, OUT of your house. Bags, boxes, you name it...pack and it and dump it. Goodwill, friends, wherever. As long as it's OUT! Now is the perfect time to weed toys before Christmas. Get a couple of big boxes and have the kids at the same time, put in there things that they do not want. Do not watch them do this. AFTER they go to bed, then YOU go through it, bagging the truly unwanted stuff, and salvaging the precious "I'm saving this for you when you're grown" stuff. Put the latter in a box and stick it in an attic or garage, LABELED. Do not wait or it will turn into another annoying pile. Be tough with yourself about that part. Something from each kid, if ykwim? The rest GOES! Load it into the back of the car, van or truck. Get it immediately out of your house. The next time you pass Goodwill, dump it. Better yet, stick it in your DH's car and make him dump it on his way home from work. He's more likely to do it to get that annoying stuff out of his vehicle. Do this in each room of your house. The kitchen pans you never use. The crap in the garage that has been there for years. Keep dumping. If you are like me, you can fill a box yourself in about 20 minutes. The point of it is, the less you have in your home, the less that you hvae to clean, pick up, wash, dust, clean or pick up. Get large and small stackable plastic bins from Home Depot or wherever. Big ones for the trains...medium ones for the Barbies...are you with me? For frequently used toys used by preschoolers and younger, Home Depot has these big round rubbermaid buckets with white rope handles stick at least one in every room of your home. This is for the little people dumping. A three year old cannot put things away in bins...But a three year old can follow the dirction "grab all of your little trucks and throw them into the big blue bucket in the corner". It's also good for big items like that play weedwhacker, the stick pony, balls, dressup crap that never has a home (unless you have an estate). I can dejunk a floor in that matter (exluding things like board games and other stuff that actualy have to be put back together) in about 10 minutes. Even if it's a large room and trashed. I have a big home. I have three of them near my kitchen, two in the living room, four in the upstiars loft and one in every bedroom, even mine. (Their crap gets in my room too). If you get the kids to dump stuff into the buckets, you can follow behind with the vacuum. Once I figured this out, I had a lot less crap sticking to my feet. When it takes you all day to pick up, you run out of time to do the floors. And then you call Merry Maids or some other service and have them do a ONE TIME deep cleaning. Yes, spend the money. Have them knock the cobwebs, scrub your toilets, strip your beds. Kill the soap scum. While they do this, bang the dirty sheets in the laundry. In about 2 hours YOUR ENTIRE HOUSE WILL BE CLEAN! A clean house is easier to keep relatively clean then the depressing sight of a completely trashed home where you don't know where to start and you don't want to think about how long it's going to take for you to do it. If you really fall in love with this, have them do it every two weeks and maintain it yourself. And get your DH involved. One of the best presents that my DH can do for me at the end of a terrible day is wash my kitchen floor. I hate floors with a total passion. If he does it after I go to bed, I don't even have to watch! LOL And there is nothing better than to wake up to a clean floor...c'mon, you know how cool that would be? Forget roses, scrub something baby! If you really can't swing the Merry Maids, then do the decluttering and have it timed to be finished by Friday. Have your DH take ALL of the kids out for most of the day. I'm talking out to breakfast..then to a discovery museum..then out to lunch...then on errands. Keep them gone as long as possible. The pour the coffee and start banging. This is what I do, because I can't swing the MMs right now. But as soon as our budget will allow it again, I'm going for it. I, too, was raised by one of those 'do it all mothers', but the truth be told, we didn't have a third of the crap back then as our kids and families have now. We used to run the neighborhood because it was safe to do so. Spend most of the day toodling around town on bikes or at the public pool. We didn't have playdates or classes or whatever. We were out having a blast and Mom was ALONE banging the house all day. I had a Barbie and a Ken and a few items of clothing that fit in one tiny box. She drove a Kleenex box, not a covertible. My dd's BarbieS (all zillion of them) has a bus, a car, and a dreamhouse. Are you wtih me? So cut yourself some slack here. She was also powered on two pots of coffee, two packs of cigarettes and hardly slept. She got it done, but beat the everloving out of herself. Hardly a personal goal, if ykwim? So dump the stuff, enlist some help. Get the older kids to take out the garbage, pick up the nitpicky toys or entertain the little ones. Start dumping, and I will tell you a secret....dumping becomes addictive. Eventually you will get frustrated when there is nothing left to dump. And keep up with the Flylady. I'm doing it myslef with varying degress of success. Start from where you are, kwim? And don't have perfect be your everyday goal. You can be perfect or spend time with your children. You can't do both. Better some toys on teh floor and a Mommy that just played dressup, then a Mommy that never has the time. JMO, but words I live by.

You might try the John Bridge forum to answer this one. -Babka

Hmm I had mealybug problems and they didn't leave any shells (that I could find), they left little transparent blobs of stickiness on the leaves (pretty serious degree of infestation), that would stick to whatever you poked at it. They also left tiny cotton balls. They have many different phases, the easiest phase for us to identify and remove them at is when they're crawlers at which point you can just poke them off with a stick or pair of tweezers. Or just kill them with q-tip with rubbing alcohol. Or mix like 1/3 rubbing alcohol with 2/3 water (do a google search) and spray the plant (try not to get any in the dirt). They infested my graptosedum succulents though, not any of my cacti. (And also my cayenne chilli plant.) Symptoms are: disfigured young leaves (they would grow but look really messed up and eventually die) and the crawlers like to hide among the joints under leaves because they don't like sunlight. Anyways long story short, I don't think mealybugs is what caused ..what I think is a ..cereus tetragonus 'Fairy Castle' cactus...to become like that. Unless you spotted some tiny mealybug crawlers? That cactus really, really needs well-draining soil. Some people have an easy time keeping it and some people (e.g. Me) don't. How did the roots look like? Rotten/soft?

"May I have someone's thoughts on Bottom layer of lirope or mondo grass followed by lambs ear with lavender in the middle circling the tree peninsula ???" I would stay away from the lamb's ear because it resembles a common weed here (which I am unsure of ID, but it looks almost identical) and it would bring me to think that you need to weed your garden. Your plant that you purchased on sale is a hibiscus rosa-sinensis (tropical hibiscus, like the kind they grow in hawaii). I have two of them, and due to our recent blast of cold weather, I brought one indoors and covered the other with a blanket. I would recommend that you bring it indoors, or keep a close eye on it until crepe myrtles are leafed out. Also, while the blooms are pretty, they usually only bloom one time each year for me, usually around june-july. Also, you may want to consider putting it in a new container. Oh, and $5 was a great deal! You will probably never see such a sale again.