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Look at me!  I'm on day 20 of this month and am not struggling the slightest with my goal!

This is a real departure from months past.  To recap:

In January I got rid of 5 things per day.  It felt great for the first couple of weeks, then I slowly...lost...energy.  I had to really rally to finish strong.  Here's a few thoughts about that goal, as I got to the end of the month.

In February I "shredded" every day with Jillian Michaels.  (Well, via amazon.com, of course).  Again, come mid-month I was faltering in my resolve to complete the 30-day Shred.  I sort of got sidetracked by thoughts of clutter and other things.

In March I limited my time online to 60 minutes per day.  Here are some thoughts I had as to why that was a struggle.

In April I wrote for 10 minutes per day about anything and nothing.  Like the months prior, I again felt my energy waning as the month went by. 

But I find myself over halfway through the month of May and have not missed facebook AT ALL.  Not a bit.  I am filling the time with other things...  Like couponing, reading library books (like this and this.  Don't you hate it when bloggers give you links, instead of just naming the titles?  So annoying).  Oh and doing a little back deck facelift. 

Behold the before:

They kind of look like haunted house chairs, right?  If I were crafty on the old photoshop, somehow I'd put a skeleton hanging limply of the side of the chair.  Picture it in your mind.

The entrance to our apartment is an uncovered deck, meaning these chairs had been left to fend for themselves out in the rain and snow for the past two years.  Yowzas.  Really did a number on them. 

About $19 and a total of maybe 20 minutes of spray-painting later, behold:

Looking cute with our blue door, right?:




The wreath was a wedding gift from our friend Bobbie, who made the arch we were married under out of sticks she found in her woods.  When the arch was taken down, she made some of the sticks into a cute wreath for us.  Awesome, right?   

I love it.  Now if only I could post these pictures on facebook.

B & A: The Dreaded Laundry Closet

I am so far off the wagon with my March goal that I can't even remember what the wagon looked like. I can't motivate to do much. I am devoting some mental energy into figuring out why I feel compelled to "produce" or "accomplish" things with my days. Maybe having something to show for my days (a new light fixture or a cleaned out cabinet) is a necessary balance for having so little to show for the majority of my time. I mean, raising kids doesn't really come with a report card or something to "show" for how I've spent most of my day.

Now before you get all "but you're doing the most important job of all" and "you have beautiful, perfectly behaved children to show for your time" (oh, stop. really) just hear that I do not really think that I have absolutely nothing to show for spending all day with my kids. It is valuable time and they are better behaved with me mothering them all day than if, say, the feral cats in the neighborhood raised them.

Sure. But most of the kids' awake time is spent in repetition- change diapers, wash diapers, serve meal, clean up after meal, and so on and so forth. And some days it is hard to feel like that adds up to much but crazy-making.

So periodically I like to tackle projects with a definitive "before" and "after". A finished product. Cue the laundry closet.

You threatened to defeat me, oh laundry closet. Oh yes you did. But in the end I prevailed.

The laundry closet has been the bane of my existence for several months now. We have open shelving on the right, the stacked washer and dryer dead ahead, and tons of crap on the floor at all times. When it is time to load the washer, picture me standing in the doorway to this laundry closet, trying to chuck various clothing items into the washer from about five feet away. There's always so much stuff in my way that getting to the actual washer is not really an option.

See how this is ripe for a good cleaning? And would give me such a feeling of accomplishment?

Here's a few tips when you decide to clean out an area. It doesn't matter if it is your bedroom or the top of your dresser. These rules apply:

1. Start in one place and work your way in one direction. Start at the top and work your way down, go left to right, or (if you're tackling an entire room) work clockwise. For this project, I started at the right side of the bottom shelf and worked my way to the right, then moved up to the next shelf, and continued the process. Don't move onto the next area until you have finished the one you are currently working on. Do not move onto shelf two until you have finished shelf one. See?

2. Stay the course. Don't take this opportunity to empty your vacuum bag, even though you move the vacuum and see that it needs it. You're not doing that right now-- you're organizing your laundry closet.

3. Get rid of as much as possible. Recognize that you don't need a good percentage of what you have, and getting rid of things frees you up to enjoy what you hold on to. Some things I got rid of: old medicines, cleaners I don't use, the bleach container that held about 1 tablespoon of bleach, ratty old towels (some repurposed for rags, some tossed), dvd's we haven't watched in years, and cd's.

4. Leave space so you can move things around on your shelves. This applies to dressers and closets, as well. If you have to stuff things onto your shelves, balanced precariously so it all stays put, chances are that you're missing out on lots of things that have gotten jammed to the back of the shelf. So get rid of some stuff so you can actually access all that is in/on your drawers, shelves, and closets.

5. Resist the temptation to buy lots of storage containers before you organize. Purge as much as is necessary, organize, and then see if you still need containers. I ended up with two spare containers at the end of this project, to be used elsewhere in the house. Score!

6. Keep in mind that the space you have right now is all that you've got to work with. Don't buy clothes or linens or cleaning supplies as if you live in 3,000 square feet with too many closets to count when, in fact, you are actually in 900 square feet with one closet. As my friend Carolyn said- "get real with yourself". This applies to the things we hold onto, and the space we are actually living in. Get real with yourself. For real. Like, seriously.

Behold the "after":

60 Minutes

Theoretically I'm 11 days into my March goal of keeping my online time to 60 minutes or under.  I say "theoretically" because I started a few days late... and I haven't been doing a great job of sticking to my goal.

I'm not sure how long I've been browsing aimlessly, but I'm sure it's been longer than an hour some days.  Some reasons why this is true:

1.  I have had two sick kids.  Sick kids means lots of time on house arrest, unable to leave our apartment and do things.  This means I feel like I'm going to lose my mind a lot, which means that I want to escape mentally.  Which leads me to browsing here and there, to avoid the reality of being on house arrest.  See?


2.  I can't get myself motivated to do much else.  I was with my friend Megan yesterday and she phrased it something like "I just couldn't make myself find any new projects".  Yup.  The daily necessities are done, but I can't make myself gather up my energy to tackle something else.
Something that would ultimately feel more purposeful and enjoyable.

See, I'm not opposed to good time zoning out on the internet, looking at blogs for inspiration and whatnot.  But I don't like using it as a way of escape or procrastination.  Not when I know that's not what actually feels good to me.  Take yesterday.  I was tired and should have napped.  That's what I really needed.  Instead I bopped around online, using up the precious naptime that I had, until my kid woke up and puked on me.  If I had napped, I might have had more energy reserves to deal with this.  I hadn't.  So it was just puke on a tired person who wished she had napped instead of frantically reading blogs while thinking "I don't really want to be doing this."

Follow that?

All that being said, I did start off the week with a little more gusto and adherence to my goal.  Here's what I did on Monday:

A close up:

Idea came from here.  With a few modifications.

See what awesome things happen when I get my tail off the internet? 

Everything But the Kitchen Sink

I tackled the under-the-sink area this weekend. It was a tough battle, but I believe I came out victorious. Observe, first, the "Before". What exactly is being housed under this sink? What it that big black wad? Was everything just thrown in there haphazardly, with no concern for rhyme OR for reason?




So I pulled everything out, and first off got rid of a few things.




Two ant traps that were lurking in the back. Totally unnecessary in the middle of January. Toss in the trash.

Jumble of reusable grocery bags. Put a hook up in the laundry closet and that's where they hang now. (And I put to use a spare hook I had just lying around! Bonus!).

I may or may not have had a bb gun under the sink. It may or may not have been brought into this house to address the stray cat problem on our premises. Sick and twisted? You can ask the hubs all about this. Or PETA. Whatever. Whether this item existed under my kitchen sink or not, certainly the proper place for it is locked in the shed, no? That's all I'll say (or not say) about that.

Other items: big old bottle of liquid Ivory soap, which only had about .5 ounces left in it. I emptied the .5 ounces into the soap dispenser by the sink and-viola- that big old 30 oz container could go in the recycling bin. Also relocated an all-purpose cleaner to the laundry closet with the rest of the cleaning supplies. (Just wait until I clean out and 5 things the mess out of that laundry closet. All of that crap is going to find it's way back under the kitchen sink!). I had a container that was neatly holding the Ivory and all-purpose cleaner, which I could get rid of.

Surely that's 5 things, right? I mean- and check out the "After", will you? Don't you just want to curl up in there, between the compost tupperware and the trash bags, and take a nap?