Spring Cleaning

The mere amount of junk we have collected in a matter of the 8 years we have lived in our house is astonishing. (Of course, I had cluttered a two-bedroom apartment in a year, so why should I be surprised, right?)DD starts her spring break this Friday, and I told her that if she (along with our help) can get her room cleaned up and is able to keep it clean for one month, then we will redecorate her room. By "keep it clean," I mean for her to put her toys away when she's done playing with them. She is excited about the prospect, because it means that she can have a princess bedroom instead of a Noah's Ark bedroom (that was the baby theme).

But, I'm sure that she feels overwhelmed when she looks in her room because there is a tiny path from the doorway to the bed. I guess we should donate the toddler bed since she is in a full-size bed now, and her play tent should be taken down because she never plays in it. It's not as if we don't have places to put her toys. She has two big plastic tubs for toys, and several large boxes, and even a bookshelf for books, but things still end up scattered everywhere.

The clutter makes me crazy--so crazy that just thinking about it makes me frustrated. I am not a neat freak by any means, but everything has a place and everything in its place is all I ask. If you get it out, put it away!

Even with all these toys, she still tells me she has nothing to do. Yeah, right.

And let's not forget the whining that comes along with being asked to do a task. I guess I'm raising a procrastinator like myself. When I was growing up, my sisters and I were badgered into cleaning every weekend. I kept my room clean; that was expected, but it was all the other cleaning that I hated: wash the walls, dust the knickknacks, clean out the dishwasher, etc. etc. I hate chores to this day. But, rationally, I know that if I don't keep things clean, then the messes start to grow and grow AND GROW, to a tipping point.

And they're at that tipping point now. So, since DH understands how overwhelming the idea of cleaning is to me, he offered to help DD work on her room and also the other rooms of the house her stuff has overtaken. My main goal is to get her toys pared down to a manageable level, clear out her outgrown clothes, and have her keep her stuff in her room instead of all over the house. I think these goals should be do-able. Once it is clean, I plan to implement Flylady's methods so that good habits can be reinforced.

I myself am bad at doing things now. I put things off until I can't stand it anymore, which is a silly way to live. You never get anything done that way. Things sit and fester, which eventually get you to a point where your once-wonderful dream home feels like a prison. I've been reading a book called "Self-Coaching," in which the author speaks of each of us having choices. Strangely, I never though of life that way before.

Everything is a choice: I can put things off until I am upset and crazy, or I can do things now and then don't have to worry about them any longer. I can browbeat myself into the Well of Self-Pity or I can choose to think that this too, shall pass.

Anyway, it was a liberating idea.

Not only am I attempting to spring-clean the external, I am working on spring-cleaning the internal. This winter has been long for me. I charted 50+ days in January and February, and of those days, only I felt "ok" for only 20 of them, and it was a "blah" kind of ok. March has been better. I attempted some different ways of thinking: if I caught myself starting to listen to the endless "grass is greener" monologue, I immediately got up and did something or thought about something else instead. (Here is an excerpt from Barbara Ehrenreich's book on how the population has always struggled with depression. via metafilter)

Habits can be changed.



(I've been adding some stuff to this blog, like Amazon textlinks. Amazon tries to decipher keywords and phrases on the blog and then adds in the appropriate textlinks; however, some of them may be only tangentially related, and have no rhyme or reason.)