Things are crazy right now with the end-of-school activities.
Add to that the wonderful and exciting event of both my boys getting baptized on Mother’s Day and the realization that if people are driving an hour to share in the celebration . . . I really want to have them over for lunch afterward . . . and this mama-whose-house-is-a-direct-reflection-of-the-busy-ness-of-her-life might just go careening off the edge.
But I decided to set aside two days this week to work on the house, and felt like that would be enough to be ready.
This . . . is big.
Especially since those two days also include prep time for speaking at a Mother’s Day brunch on Saturday morning, an end-of-the-year conference and baseball games and school programs.
As I was practicing my talk while working in my daughter’s room (yes, I’m even tackling that!), I realized that I have come a long way. Sometimes it doesn’t feel that way, but I have. When I speak, I share how it used to take me two weeks to be ready for company to come over. One week to declutter (which really means I shoved everything in the master bedroom and locked the door), and another week to clean. (They’re supposed to laugh at the master bedroom thing.)
Now, I can be ready in two days. An emergency party (is there such a thing?) could happen in a few hours, but two days should get me to let-the-MIL-through-the-front-door status. Even after a busy week/month/year.
It’s a good feeling.
As part of today’s Decluttering Festivities I tackled a spot that has bugged the blankety-blank out of me lately. I’ve been pretending that the people who come for homegroups don’t see it, even though I know they do. It’s a huge eyesore.
Ready?
I know. It took some serious Intentional Slob Vision to pretend that didn’t exist!
I sort-of kind-of went through the papers. Meaning, I trashed the things that obviously needed to be trashed like receipts for lettuce purchased in 2011 and school calendars from months gone by.
But I didn’t go through each and every envelope and piece of paper making decisions. Instead, I rearranged the things in the cabinet (that I never use anyway since I can’t get INto the cabinet), forced the lid of the file-box shut, and used a cabinet shelf to store the remaining papers.
I conveniently forgot to take a picture of how not-great that looked, but did take a picture of the newly cleared, ready-for-a-mother-in-law counter.
My short-term goal: Open the door and shove paper on that shelf instead of absent-mindedly placing it on that way-too-convenient counter space.
My long term goal: Come up with a filing system that can be stored on that shelf. Oh, and part two of that goal is to actually use whatever system I find.
How is this better than my pre-blog methods? Well, pre-blog there were about twenty other piles like this one around the house. Feeling completely overwhelmed with piles, I generally dumped them in laundry baskets or random boxes and moved them to the master bedroom.
Shoving one pile into a place that can truly serve as its home? I call that progress.
