Clean Up Your Act

For most people this wouldn't be newsworthy, but for me it is :-)

For most of my adult life, I have been a very (very... very) messy person. At times, I have even lived in places that were not only untidy, but were dirty... because I never, ever, hardly ever cleaned. In recent history, I have managed to upgrade that to moderately messy, but clean... because we hired a bi-weekly housekeeper. The challenge for me has been the shift in thinking from 'set this down and walk off - maybe it will put itself away' to 'put it where it belongs'. I understand that most folks make this shift in their twenties when they get a career or start having babies and put down roots. I guess we just never did that. I spent my twenties in unsatisfying retail and restaurant jobs while pretending to go to college or supporting my husband through law school. We moved a lot and always rented. We never found a place that was home or that we cared enough about to take care of.

A couple of years ago, our marriage almost ended. When we decided to try to save our family, we decided that putting down roots was going to be a big part of that. After successfully avoiding home ownership and parenthood for over 13 years, we bought a house and had a baby within 13 months. Oddly enough, this didn't magically turn me into a domestic goddess. The mess just followed us like the cloud around Pigpen.

As my Mama has been hinting, suggesting and outright telling me for a very long time now, it makes a big difference in your mental state when you are surrounded by mess versus tidy. I just never made it priority... until this tiny person showed up. Not only do I want to show her how to grow up healthy, she runs her fingers, toes, lips and tongue over everything she can reach. Messes are no longer just unsightly, they have the potential to be disgusting and/or dangerous. It's way past time for a change.

So, as part of my recent effort to recommit myself to my job as stay-at-home mama, I have committed myself to keeping our home looking like a place that we want to be. Toward that end, I spent all of last week (with the exception of a sorry bit of time on Sunday) in a tidy home. We could have had drop-in guests at any time, and I would not have been embarrassed :-) It feels so nice to live in a place that looks this good.

Wait, am I turning into an adult? Will I start marking pages in the Pottery Barn catalogue or stalking the IKEA website for sales? Will we finally put some effort into finishing the house? Only time will tell, my friends. Only time will tell.

Why I Don't Get Anything Done

Here was my list for today:

1. Drop Lily Ruth off at Parent's Day Out
2. Go to Central Market for the 'specialty items'
3. Go to regular HEB for the regular stuff
4. Finish my blog post on kid food
5. Make a few more Halloween felt toys
6. Dump the yucky stuff from the fridge and do the dishes

Here's what I've done:

1. Drop Lily Ruth off at Parent's Day Out

2. Go to Central Market for the 'specialty items'

3. Stare at my truly awe inspiring pile of felt and haphazardly sketch a few 'bats' that look more like butterflies

4. Google 'Halloween bat stencils' and gaze dispiritedly at the results

5. Scroll through Baby Center and post on a couple of threads

6. Talk on the phone for 45 minutes

7. Scrounge through the guest room looking for the manual for my broken phone

8. Find the manual then decide to rearrange the mountain of clutter in the guest room (BTW, mountain is not an exaggeration. If anything, it is too kind.)

9. Spend over an hour hauling paper bags of books into new positions and sadly pawing through numerous boxes of JUNK MAIL before deciding that it all needs to be truly sorted before throwing it out.

10. Sit on the couch sneezing from the dust stirred up by the rearrangement process and blog about NOT finishing my previous blog post while gazing glassy-eyed at Logo TV.

Here, have a gander at Lily Ruth telling me how silly she is. It's only 27 seconds long (because my crummy old phone only records for 27 seconds at a time), so you'll be in and out in no time:

That's the best I can manage for now. I have to go pretend like I'm gonna to clean the kitchen. In reality, I'm probably gonna hunt down some chocolate then take a bath and read a book.