A Little Organization is in Order

When I was working full-time, I thought that the house would be cleaner when I became a stay at home mom. I'd be home all the time and would be able to clean all day if my little heart felt like it. How naive I was! Maybe I've contributed to the fact that Natalie likes to be held and likes to be interacted with instead of left to entertain herself for more than 5 minutes at a time, but I want to be a hands-on mom. The problem with that is that I have not discovered how to balance that desire with the necessity of maintaining a home. In an effort to stay on top of the accumulating dirty dishes, laundry (both clean and unfolded and the dirty stuff), and hardwood/tile floor sweeping/vacuuming/mopping, I'm going to try a few new organization tips that I found online recently. Somewhere I read that when you leave a room and pass by something that doesn't belong there, pick it up and put it away. Little by little, things will get put back in place and chaos will start to be transformed. I can handle this.

I also have a bad habit of not picking up after myself. Clothes get piled up when I take them off instead of getting put with the dirty clothes, mail gets piled up on the countertops in the kitchen. I want to set up a system to organize mail into shred, file, and bills categories so that it doesn't just lay in a heap.

The third baby step in my little plan is to take shoes off when we enter the house. We've talked and talked and talked about doing this, but for some reason I'm really bad about it. My hope is that the floors will stay cleaner longer, although having an indoor dog is like asking for dirty floors anyway.

Lastly, I want to try really hard to resist the urge to plop down in front of Netflix or Facebook, Pinterest, or Blogger and veg for who-knows-how-long when in the far recesses of my mind I know that the dishes are calling out, screaming actually, to be unloaded and reloaded into the dishwasher or that basket of clean laundry that has been sitting in front of the dryer since I took it out of the dryer a week ago is begging to be folded and put away. I'm going to tell on myself some more by letting you know that my poor husband wore my socks several days last week because I hadn't matched and put away socks that had been in the laundry room in said basket in front of the dryer for a week. And I didn't bother to tell him that they were in there either. It's safe to say that I'm not going to win "Homemaker of the Year" this year! So, instead of vegging, I want to complete one of these tasks first, and then use computer or tv time or sewing time, whatever is tempting at the moment, as a reward. (Sidenote: While watching Netflix a few weeks ago, I watched the documentary Freakanomics, which talked about incentives and bribery to get highschoolers to succeed. I'm an adult, and am not ashamed to admit that incentives work on me, too!)

So, maybe if I'm successful and can get my act together, I'll share how things are going in a few weeks. And you better bet your bottom dollar that Natalie will learn how to help around the house as soon as she's old enough to match socks ;)