Routines

One of my biggest struggles in, well, life, is keeping things organized and neat. I’m terrible at it. I grew up in an extremely clutters house – it wasn’t quite Hoarders status, but it definitely would have worked well on a show like Clean House. We had too much stuff, and we didn’t have a place for each of our belongings, and it was a constant pile-up.

So one of my big goals has always been to make sure that my own home doesn’t end up that way.

So far we have done alright with that. Before I moved out of my parents’ house, I pared down my belongings significantly. I was able to move in with my then-fiance and his family using one car load. And my car wasn’t very big.

But slowly things have accumulated. Part of it is that in our home we have lots of hand me downs from my in laws. We have their spare furniture, for one, and we also have enough silverware to feed an army. We also have tons of hand me down clothes for the babies. Just this weekend I was given a trash bag filled with size 9 and 12 baby clothes. I am grateful for that, but at the same time, it is hard to manage all that extra stuff.

To combat the mess, I’ve put two routines to help me keep under control. This idea was borrowed from A Slob Comes Clean. When she first started her blog, she started with one non-megotiable task, and slowly added in more of those tasks.

My routines: I must wash at least one load of laundry each day. With two adults, one toddler, and one baby, it definitely adds up. Add in the part-time cloth diapering, and doing laundry daily just seems necessary. I want to get to the point where I wash AND fold AND put away a load a day, but I’m just not there yet.

My other routine is to make sure the living room is picked up every night before bed. This seems simple, but unless I consciously tell myself to do it, it doesn’t get done. The majority of Monkey’s toys stay in her room, but the living room has plenty of books, as well as coloring books and crayons and baby toys for Bear. I’m also totally guilty of leaving dirty socks on the floor right where I take them off, spit up rags, laundry that I started to fold that didn’t get finished, etc. It feels so much better to wake up in the morning to a clean living room. And since the kids are gone all day, it stays clean until we get home in the evening and it is so nice to have the living room look presentable.

I’ve been working on these two simple tasks for the past 2 weeks. That probably sounds like nothing. But for me, those tasks pile up so quickly. At bedtime I feel so tired I could keel over dead right then and there, but spending that extra five minutes to toss all the toys into bookshelf bins makes a world of difference.

It feels nice to finally have my house somewhat under control. Now I need to work on keeping up what I’ve got going now, add in some extra steps (slowly! Baby steps!) and pretty soon I’ll be the next Martha Stewart (ha!). Then, if I could just find the balance and keep.my classroom clean too… that would be simply incredible.

Anyway. Living room is picked up, laundry is in the dryer, Bear in the crib, and my husband is putting Monkey down. I have now dozed off 3 times while writing this, so k gjedd.tsmget

B