Awesome NOT procrastinating day

Have you ever felt you were drowning in stuff? That you would rather move and sell the house as is with everything in it, just so you could start over? That's how I've felt in the past several years. Like we were just staying on top of things. As soon as we seemed to be making headway, something would happen and things would pile up. Don't get me wrong, our house is not knee deep in clutter with only paths to walk through the house like some you see on tv, but it is a level of clutter that drains the spirit just by existing. We're trying to fix it, and this time, we just might do it...

This weekend was crazy awesome! Okay, it was nasty and rainy and 40 degrees all weekend, keeping us in the house with the 2 year old all weekend. BUT, I got sooooo much done! First of all, my friend Heather came over to my house and we cooked up a storm. She is such an amazing person I don't know how she does everything. A few months ago, we started getting together once a month to cook and freeze meals for our families. I am always amazed when we get together at how much we get done. My big plan with the cooking was that I would mooch off of Heather's cooking abilities while offering ingredients and willing hands. It's working brilliantly in my book. :) We got together on Saturday morning and planned on cooking 4 dishes. We ended up with 6 or 7. Not only that, but my kitchen is cleaner now than it was when the day started. :) We definitely need to cook at my house again.

We also really worked hard this weekend to get things accomplished. One of our difficulties in the past has been that we try to schedule lots of chores during naptime. But, if we work through naptime each weekend day, then we're tired and want some downtime when Katie gets up again. To counter this problem, Jim and I decided to hire Ricarda, our teenage "daughter" (exchange student living with us), to take care of our 2 year old for a few hours between nap and dinner for one day each weekend. She babysat Katie for 3 hours today and it was great. We got a little downtime during nap as well as getting started on our chores and then we had three blessed hours to get stuff done. Yay! A good hunk of decluttering happened today. A good start to move forward from.

Another thing that we are trying to do to stay on top of our daily and weekly chores better is an adapted version of the daily 7. We can't manage everything that Stephanie does everyday with our full schedules at work but we've added a few things to help us get started. Now, I make the bed everyday (Jim never makes it right anyway :) ) and Jim cleans the cat litter box each day. Three days during the week I will put a load in the laundry and Jim moves it to the dryer before work. Then we put it away together that night. Although these changes are small, I've already seen an improvement in our home life. I have not come home or awakened to the smell of cat poop on the floor. Our cats are old and picky and they poop on the floor if they don't like how clean their litter box is. In the past, this has been every other day. It drove me crazy. Not this week. The bed has been nice a neat everytime I come home and that always makes me feel better. Also, it is easier to sleep when the covers have been straightened each day and the sheets are tight on the bed again. Even the laundry was easier to do. Although we weren't able to stick to putting the laundry away each night we did a load this week, we did get it put away before the weekend and that meant that the rest of the laundry was sooooo much easier to do and get put away. In fact, it is late Sunday night and the only laundry that isn't finished is the sheets I put in earlier today. Everything else is not only clean and dry but in a drawer or hung up. Considering that it is more common for the laundry to hang around in baskets until next laundry day, this is HUGE. I even had time to blog tonight. :) We'll see how things continue but I am hopeful after our start this week on keeping our day to day lives from being too chaotic and making headway in the backlog of things that we need to do and get rid of.