If you think the roots are badly congested, pot up slightly now, without disturbing roots other than to make a few vertical slits in the root mass and cutting an 'X' on the bottom of the root mass. If roots aren't badly congested, just wait. Get the plant outdoors and acclimated to full sun asap in May - as early as you can, as long as you're conscientious about moving the plant indoors when temps under 50-55* are predicted. The plant will respond extremely well to outdoor conditions. I would repot just after Father's Day. Let the plant recover until after the 4th of July, then cut it back as hard as you want to. The plant will back-bud vigorously, and you'll have up to around mid-Oct outdoors for the plant to recover .... again, if you watch temps. It's best not to cut back hard AND repot at the same time. If a plant needs both, I prefer to repot first, which leaves all the photosynthesizing machinery intact. After roots have recovered and have a good amount of stored energy, THEN you can pretty much cut back at will. Attempting stressful operations like a full repot or hard pruning are best avoided in winter and early spring for houseplants. Planning your repots so they take place between Father's Day and July 4th pretty much ensures a plant with good energy reserves that is better able to withstand stress than at any other period in the growth cycle. This, combined with maximum photo-period and photo-intensity, makes for the fastest recovery time and lowest vulnerability to insects, disease, or other complications related to low energy or slow recoveries. Al

I don't want to hijack the OP's thread, but I'd like to comment on some things I think are related. For those of you who are suggesting multiple Easter baskets, did your kids get more than one Easter basket at Easter when they were little? We didn't. We didn't get more than one Christmas stocking either. I don't know what particular situations you had, but I know when I was little, I didn't get as much stuff. We had our simple fun such as one Easter basket and one Easter egg hunt and that was it. I'm finding that with my children, the kids and our household are being overwhelmed with too much junk...toys, candy, etc. It's not just holidays and it's not just grandparents doing it. I find Christmas, Easter, or whatever holiday isn't as much fun for anyone - adults or kids - when the kids get too much stuff. There is the immediate factor where the kids are so overwhelmed with so many presents that they are screaming, there is the what are we going to do with all this stuff when we get it home because the kids already have to much, and then the factor where the kids don't appreciate what they get. Extra stuff causes extra stress. Another factor in this is the junk food. Someone mentioned the kids getting a basket of candy and then letting the adults share in the candy later so the kids don't get too much. Please don't put anyone in the position of taking/sneaking candy away from the kids. If it is given to my kids, they know about it, want it, and it is theirs. Taking it away creates a fuss. Not taking candy away makes a mess and some very unhappy kids after the sugar runs it course. I'm willing to be the bad guy when my kids need it, but why purposely put me or dh in the bad guy position in the first place. We have plenty of battles t fight already. Last year we were at a family event and a relative walked in and handed each of my children a container of peeps,a baggy full of chocolate and a coke. My fil was dying and we knew this would be our last time to see him. I wanted this to be a time of good memories and tried to make sure that nothing happened to spoil it. I tried to do damage control. It didn't work. I was still the bad guy. Thinking back, I don't think that there would have been a solution to that situation. Any action I would have taken would have made at least one person unhappy. Like I said in my earlier post, I don't know the solution to the problem. In my case, I have politely asked both sides of the family (mine and dh's) not to give so much stuff. If they insist on giving something, I have tried explain my position and to direct them to gifts the kids could use such as clothes. I've also asked for the gift of time. I do want my kids and grandparents/relatives to have memories together.

Frankie, a few years ago, I could have written your post. The mess was enormous, and I just couldn't see how to get out of it. I was basically paralyzed from the chaos. This is going to be a long post, but I'm going to tell you what worked for me. Not because I think you should follow every step I did, but because maybe my thought processes will help you figure out what will work for you. 1. Get enough sleep. When I'm tired, not only do I not do regular housework, I create more mess. I can make dinner, but then I'm too tired to clean up after dinner. Not a good place to be. Along with getting enough sleep (and it take take a week or two to get to a well-rested place), get a physical, if you haven't had one recently. Make sure you are not anemic or have low B-12 or any of a number of other things that can make you tired and turn your brain to mush. Once I started B-12 and iron supplements, things started to get better. 2. Don't make things worse. In other words, start today to clean up after yourself. Make a sandwich? Before you go to bed, clean up the crumbs from the counter, put the plate in the dishwasher and make sure the mayo, bread, cold cuts, etc. are all back where they belong. Don't worry right now about cleaning up the existing mess; just don't add to it. Some people call this Eliminating the Evidence--meaning that you don't leave evidence of what you've been doing. 3. Find techniques that work for you. FlyLady, if it works for you, is great. But the goal is to find things that work for you, not someone else. These are my techniques. A. Use "wasted" time. Every morning, I stagger out to the kitchen and put on water for tea. While the water heats up, I empty the dishwasher and dish strainer, feed the cat and make my bed. While the tea steeps, I go around the apartment and open the shades and get dressed. If I'm microwaving something, I use the time to change out the dish towel, wipe down the counters, sweep the floor, write a shopping list. B. Get in a rut. For some things, having a set routine can work well. My morning routine can be carried out even if I'm half asleep--put on kettle, empty dishwasher, make bed, pour water over tea, get dressed, open shades. And it has the extra, added benefit that it's 6:15 in the morning and I've already made the bed and put the dishes away! Nothing like starting the day accomplishing something! I have an evening cat care routine that involves cleaning the litter box, refilling water bowls and checking the food bowl. The cat is so used to this routine that she follows me around, checking up on me. The key benefit to a routine is that you have done it so often that you don't have to think about it, you just do it. Somehow, that makes it easier for me to do. C. Try to create habits. I started by deciding I would add one new housekeeping habit a month. My goal for the month would be to do that task every day. I started with the litter box, because why should the cat have to suffer because she came to live with me? I would get out of bed to clean the darned thing if I forgot. But at the end of the month, it came much more easily to me to remember to do it. Then I started washing the dishes every night after dinner. I have a dishwasher, but there's always stuff that can't go in it and that stuff would pile up in the sink until I couldn't use the sink and then I'd have to wash it all in a hurry because I needed to use the sink. But for a month, every night, I'd wash whatever was in there. And I got used to walking into the kitchen every morning and seeing a nice empty sink. At this point, I have the cat care routine, the evening kitchen routine (do dishes, wipe counters/stove top, sweep floor), the morning routine, and an evening routine of change to pajamas, wash face/brush & floss teeth, read for half an hour. Those are the daily routines. Weekly, I deal with one room a day. It gets "tidied up," i.e. everything gets put back where it belongs. Then it gets dusted and vacuumed. Once a month, each room gets a slightly more in depth cleaning, with dusting of the baseboards and window sills, vacuuming behind the furniture, etc. When I started the weekly room-a-day routine, it took me forever to clean one room, because I had to stop and think about each and every step--oops! I forgot to dust those table legs! Oh, heck, I need to empty the trash! Guess I should have put that stack of books away before I backed into it and knocked them down. After two months (it takes me a while), I got used to cleaning each room, I knew the best way to get all the work done, and it took me less than half the time it did when I started. And this was an important lesson for me. It takes longer to clean a dirty room than to clean a room that was cleaned last week. And the more often you clean, the faster and better you get at it. So for the stuff you have to do--dishes, laundry, cooking--try to find a way to make it as routine as possible. I get up on Saturday and put in a load of laundry. Then I clean the bathroom. Then I move the laundry to the dryer and start the second load. Then I make a meal plan for the week and write a shopping list. Then I put the first load away dry the second load. Then I head out to the supermarket. Then I get home, put the food away and put the second load away. It's 10 am on Saturday, the bathroom is clean, the food is bought, I know what I'm eating for the next week, my laundry is done and I have clean underwear for the upcoming week. I can goof off for the rest of the weekend with a clear conscience. (And I do!) But that started with just doing the laundry Saturday morning, and has slowly grown to include the other things over time. Start small. Work up to big. D. Do tiny things. Clean for just 10 minutes. Or clean just one small area--a drawer, a table top. If you do just 10-15 minutes of "extra" housework a day, you will be surprise at how much better things start to look in just a week or two. It may seem silly--"The entire place is a mess! What good will 10 minutes clearing off the kitchen table do!?!" It will make your house look 10 minutes cleaner, and that's better than nothing. 5. Analyze your messes. If the kitchen table is always covered with stuff, sit down and write out a list of the stuff. Why does it end up on the kitchen table? Is it because it has no place else to go? Then it needs a home. You need to find a place to store it. Is it because you enter the house through the kitchen and you need to put things down to take off your coat? Then you need a system to make putting your coat away easier and a system to clear these things off the kitchen table--or in other words, another routine. Clutter, for me, happens for one of two reasons. I don't have any place designated for the stuff to go, or it's too difficult to put stuff away. I'm a firm believer that you can't make it too easy to put stuff away. I remember a Clean Sweep episode where the husband tossed his dirty clothes all over the bedroom floor. So in the final reveal, they showed him his new laundry hamper. And I knew instantly that he'd never use it. It had a lid, for one thing. It was in his closet, for another thing, and it was tucked under a shelf with barely an inch to spare. So, just imagine this. You have dirty clothes in one hand and you approach your closet. You have to 1) open the closet door, 2) pull out the hamper, 3) open the lid, 4) put the clothes into the hamper, 5) close the lid, 6) push the hamper back under the shelf and 7) close the closet door--all with one hand! A big laundry basket on the floor of the closet would have worked better. 1) Open closet door, 2) throw clothes in laundry basket, 3) close closet door. Frankie, you mention putting your shoes back into their box. How do you store the boxes? Are they on shelves that are easy to get to, or are all the boxes stacked one on top of the other, so that it's difficult to pull one out and put it back in the right place? Is storing the shoes in their boxes the best, easiest solution for you? Or would a free-standing shoe cabinet work better--open door, put shoes in cubby, close door? Or shelves? Or putting the shoe boxes on shelves? Take a good long look at what types of things aren't getting put away. It may take some thinking and analyzing to figure out why they aren't going where they belong, and then some more thinking to figure out how to make it as easy as possible to put them away. But once you've found the solution, it becomes as easy to put things back where they belong as it does to keep them out. And your home looks much nicer as a result. And if you've managed to read to the end of this novel, I'm amazed. But I've been where you are and if I can help at all, I want to. I hated living in chaos. I vastly prefer a neat, tidy, clean house. Yours in the messy sisterhood, Cammy

Well, Alisande, during a flu outbreak, every one should wash their hands multiple times a day. But I do not think this administration engineered a swine flu outbreak to push a health care bill, as has been suggested. Nor do I believe this was some sort of terrorist attack. That was suggested up-thread. The Center for Disease Control (CDC), and the World Health Organization (WHO) have been totally transparent in their tracking of this disease. Case zero has been discovered - we know where it came from. It was a child living near a pork factory in Mexico. He got ill and recovered, but not before passing the virus on to others. No conspiracy.