Moving Right Along . . .

Wow, I haven't written for awhile, and I have a long list of excuses. The top one is because I have been getting my home ready to sell on the housing market and at the same time handling all the little details of moving my family to another state! It has been CRAZY busy!

I have thought several times about what can be said to help families dealing with a move, especially when you are going a long distance. I think the number one biggest thing you can do is to GET RID OF YOUR STUFF! Now, this sounds easy, but when there are 9 people involved it is not so simple. Just with furniture, I figure that we have 9 beds and one hideaway couch, 2 full sets of living/family room furniture, dining room/kitchen furniture, and 8 closets full of current clothing! The garage & storage shed alone could probably have filled a semi-trailer before we began all of our decluttering! But we have really been whittling it down to make it manageable. It's time to Simplify our Home!

My goal is to fit everything we need into one moving truck which is probably about the size of a 2-car garage, but narrower & longer. SO -- think about that! An entire household, 6 bedrooms, office, 2 living/family room areas, dining room, 3.5 bathrooms, all into one space. The key? We need to get rid of lots of the stuff we've gathered over the past 4 years! Plus all the stuff we brought with us from the previous moves, that has continued to serve no purpose, in the hopes that we "might need it someday".

There are lots of resources out there on the internet to help you with your delcuttering efforts. I think it's a great idea to "pretend" to move, even when you're not. Just go to www.google.com and enter in "decluttering" and see how much comes up! Some of my favorites, which you can research on google are:

• Don Aslett (cleaning & decluttering guru) www.donaslett.com, www.cleanreport.com
  
• Flylady (helping women to "finally love yourself" by clearing out physical & mental clutter) at www.flylady.net
  

There are dozens more out there, just do a google search on declutter, and you'll have more links than you can possibly imagine! Obviously, this is a universal human struggle! We have such a need to collect "things", thinking they will ease our lives or make us happier. Some of these items do help us in our quality of life, for instance, I absolutely love my special "blanket", and my comfy "pillow". I like my 3-way-mirror on my vanity, where I get ready each morning. When I'm traveling, I really do miss these things! But other things, like the foot bath that I thought would really help, but I never use because it is too messy and just vibrates my feet and tickles them, is really not a necessity! (Don't worry, it's already gone!)

Well, you get the idea, and I'm just rambling today, but I really needed to get another blog entry on the site, and I thought, "Well, what have I been doing for the past 2 months?" Besides painting and home repairs, the number one thing we have to do to make our home fabulous for potential buyers, and make our move smoother, is to dejunk!

So, as I sort through closets & drawers over the next few weeks, my mantra will be: 1) Do you HAVE to have this item? Is it critical to your daily life? and 2) If not, is it an item that you absolutely love, that you would run into a burning house to retrieve because it is so special? If the answer to these 2 questions is NO, then GET RID OF IT! Give it to someone who will really enjoy it and will benefit from it, and quit storing it, moving it, caring for it, and letting it take over your life!

There are many great organizations for getting rid of useful things that you don't need. One of the ones I have found recently and have really fallen in love with is "Freecycle". Just go to www.freecycle.com and see if there's a group in your area. It is an email group where people post things they want to give away, and you can give and receive, and recycle stuff, for free! Just be careful to give away more than you pick up! ;)

And of course there are organizations like Goodwill, Deseret Industries, the Salvation Army, Helping Hands, and M.S. that will take your used things and make them available to those in need. So think of it as blessing the life of someone else, and it won't be as hard to give your things away!

Well, I'd better get back to my project. By the way, does anyone have need for any stuffed animals? How about a yogurt maker? What about a bunch of great scrap paper? Books? Magazines? Old jeans to make into a quilt. . . ahh, the freedom of letting go!

Home Organization Plan

Today I found a fun link that I thought readers of the my blog would really enjoy. It's a website called www.justmommies.com. It's all about pregnancy, childbirth, child-rearing, etc. I didn't spend a lot of time on the "new mommy" parts of the site, but they look well-thought-out and informational for ladies just beginning the parenting journey, as well as those making their way through those first years.

The part of the webisite which I found to be useful at my stage in life was the Home Organization Plan. It's a very simple plan for daily, weekly, and monthly cleaning, plus de-cluttering challenges each month. I am in the process of preparing my family for an out-of-state move, and we are putting our home on the market in about 3 weeks. Needless to say, there's lots of projects to be done, and I want my children to get into some better habits of keeping things "spotless"!

In the past I have been really big on letting go and realizing that our home is to "live in", not to "show off". Sure, I want a clean home, I am a perfectionist at heart. BUT, I don't want a perfectly spotless home at the expense of our family's peace! I did great at keeping my home extremely clean up until somewhere between my 4th & 6th children's births, when my standards just had to be lowered, for the sake of my own sanity! It just became so overwhelming that I could not keep up as well as I wanted to anymore. So I have just learned to let go of (most of) my perfectionism, do the best I can, and then relax and enjoy my family.

BUT. . .putting the house on the market is a different story! Now the house needs to be so clean that with only a short notice I can have it ready to "show off" to potential buyers. So, I am working hard on re-establishing some of the habits that I had let slide, both my own habits as well as my children's. Of course, one of the biggest helps is getting rid of tons of stuff, and boxing up what we want to keep, but can do without for the next 3 months.

So it is in this frame of mind that I googled "daily housekeeping" today to get some new ideas. I always love new ideas! The thing I liked about the JustMommies Home Organization Plan was the fact that someone else figured it out!! I have enough to think about with the home sale, out-of-state-move & new home purchase. I don't want to have to worry about when the perfect time is to clean the toilets! :) So I found this cute little February calendar that you can print out, with all the tasks on them for the month. (You can download the other months here). I'm going to give it a try, adjusting the daily housekeeping tasks to my personal situation.

Right now our family's main housecleaning schedule is a big 2-3 hour session on Saturday with the whole family helping. We have 4 teams (one older person & one younger in each group). The teams are these:
1. Tidy & Vacuuming Team
2. Garbage & Hard Floors Team
3. Kitchen & Bathrooms Team
4. Dust & Polish Team

This weekly consistency has worked really well to keep up with the basics, and to be honest, it's a great family-togetherness time! We put on great music and can visit with the person on our team, talking about things that we might not ever get a moment to discuss otherwise. Of course, as always, when children are helping, the cleaning is not always done to the standards that Mom would like. So with a home on the market, I figure I need to go back over many areas giving them "Mom's touch" with this cute little cleaning calendar. So, that's my plan! I hope a few of these ideas can help you out.

Another resource that might be helpful to you is www.flylady.net. She is a great motivator, and sends daily emails (about a dozen per day!) that tell you what to work on in our your home each day. She's great at teaching you to establish daily habits and to "do anything in 15 minutes". She focuses on "Finally Loving Yourself" (FLY-ing), and letting go of perfectionism so you don't drive yourself crazy! So that's another resource that may be of help to you.

If any of you have other cleaning & organization resources, websites, or ideas that you think could help someone else, please leave a comment! I believe that the best resources we have are ideas and strategies that we can learn from each other. Thanks for reading! Have a great day!

Book Eating Monsters & Little Entrepreneurs

Here I am, pulling up to my home after a physical therapy appointment, when something catches my eye. I turn to look and there's my 7-year-old son and 5-year-old daughter sitting in lawn chairs next to an elaborate "store" that they've set up on my front lawn. I inwardly chuckle, for you see, we live in the country on a quiet street with few children, so the chance of anyone stopping to buy anything is very remote. For months I've been trying to explain to him that a yard sale would be a waste of time. But kids are very determined....

As I peruse the store, I see see things such as army men, a bouncy ball, and other long-forsaken toys displayed creatively on ladders, chairs and tables. Taped to the various items are signs with prices. Very cute. That is, until my 13-year-old daughter realized that the 5-year-old was selling some of HER stuff! :) She promptly retrieved her things and helped her little sister make some lemonade & cookies to sell.

I must admit I'm not too surprised that they started this sale. I definitely know where it all started. . .

Last week we were doing the weekly "library book and movie search". If you have children who love to read, you can picture exactly what I'm talking about. It's not too bad if you start at least an hour before you need to leave for the library, but otherwise it can be a nightmare!

Why can't everyone keep track of their books?? It's like the children's bedrooms are book-eating monsters taking up residence in my home! It's really ridiculous because I have a very clear place where the library books are to be kept, but on library return day, it always takes a bit of a search to find all the books that have been left on nightstands, in the car, under the bed, or who-knows-where-else.

Sometimes we can't find the book at all, and I finally relent and go pay for it. I've figured out that as soon as I pay for it, we will find it! :) So that's my last resort option. Luckily, our library refunds what you paid for the book, minus any fines that you had incurred up until that day. So it works out, but it's quite embarrassing for a woman who is normally very responsible and careful with borrowed items (pre-mommyhood, that is!) So, I've started a new thing that if a child loses a book, THEY get to go face the librarian and pay for it. That's helped some with library-item responsibility.

So, to get back to my story, on this particular occasion, there were 2 books that had been lost for weeks and no one seemed to know anything about where they are, or even who checked them out! So I was personally digging through the drawers, bookshelves, under beds, etc. Now, to put this in perspective, we've had extended family here on & off all summer long, and I've had some health problems that have made it more difficult for me to get done what needs to be done since summer started. Specifically, I hadn't been down to the children's rooms regularly to make sure they were tidying up each evening. So, if you have children, you can imagine what the rooms looked like! If you don't have children, or yours are still small, just picture some of the scenes you witnessed on TV in the weeks after hurricane Katrina. (Seriously! Okay, so I'm exaggerating a bit, but not too much!)

I began to have what I've fondly come to think of as a melt-down. I suppose in reality I was mostly just frustrated with myself that I'd let them go to bed all those nights without tidying their rooms better. But in my defense, they SAID they had tidied their rooms! And they're sweet little angels who would never tell Mom a fib, right? Ha. In their defense, they may not have meant to be dishonest, but a child's version of "my room is clean" is much different that mine!

The biggest problem is that I hadn't been inspecting. That's something I've learned in my many years of parenting. You ALWAYS have to inspect your children's work! Firstly, because if they've worked hard, they deserve someone to have a look and praise them for what they've done so far. Secondly, they generally need a few pointers on what they can do to make it better. I really try hard to be positive and praise them for what they accomplished before offering constructive criticism.

Well, that's the ideal, blah, blah, blah . . . but on this particular day, all the wisdom of my years vanished as I stared an honest-to-goodness melt-down. (You have to give me some slack...it was day #1 in my womanly schedule, if you know what I mean!) It went something like this:

"I can't believe all this STUFF you all have!" I ranted as I dug things from under a bed and piled them in the middle of the room.

"By the time I get home today, I'd better see at least 12 bags from everyone's rooms lined up in the hallways for charity!" (emphatically as I dumped things from drawers and shelves looking for the elusive books.)

"I can't believe I've been taking you all to the pool and the movie, and letting you play with friends when your rooms looked like this!" (as I gathered dirty laundry from every corner of the room and piled it into their dirty laundry baskets)

I continued: "Absolutely NO MORE movies, TV, friends, swimming, games, computer . . . NOTHING FUN until all these rooms look like the front of a magazine cover!"

And so on...and on...and on...

Okay, so it was a bit of a LARGE melt-down!

So they got the message. I really rocked their worlds. By the end of the day, they'd made a ton of progress and the rooms were getting cleared out and looking much better. In some ways, the rooms looked a little messier, but that's because they couldn't shove anything under their beds! So Mom was pleased and things headed back to normal, with an admonition to continue de-junking over the next few weeks, and a promise of some help from Mom if they needed it.

It's amazing what a melt-down can do! I know, I know, it's not the best way to teach cleanliness, but it produces results sometimes when nothing else does!

A few days later I went downstairs to tuck the kids into bed. Two of the rooms looked like tornadoes had hit them. I couldn't believe my eyes! Will it ever end?

I spoke with one pair of my daughters who share a room that even the most organized, efficient person in the world would have a hard time keeping their room clean. There's simply too much stuff! So the clearing out has begun again in earnest. I promised them that if they would all get their rooms finished, I would do my own closet (a big project...I still need to get started!) And, we will go to an amusement park. So...it will be worth it!

So back to the cute kids and the yard sale. As predicted, they didn't have much success. They had one customer -- she bought the bouncy ball, bless her heart!

After about an hour, my oldest daughter felt sorry for the little one with the lemonade stand, so she went out and spent some money, and so did I. So they made a few cents.

Now they're cleaning up and I told them that I would "buy" anything they were willing to give to charity (at MY named price!). I figure they should be rewarded for working so hard to clean out their rooms and for being so business-savvy. (wink, wink)

Aren't children fun? Like I've said before, always full or surprises! I don't think I could ever come up with such good entertainment without them! What a great way to end the day...bargaining with my 7-year-old son about prices for his stuff. Of course, you know what he'll do with it? Go to the dollar store and buy more clutter!

It's a never-ending battle, but one I'm determined to win, one day at a time. I suppose someday I'll sit here in a clutter-free, immaculate home and feel awfully lonely. I'll take the clutter along with the kids! It's worth it!