I’ve been feeling overwhelmed for the majority of this year.

This year being . . . . 2011.  Which is less than 4 days old.

Anyway, I’m in Haphazard Holiday Recovery Mode.  The house was kept in a far-from-perfect-but-livable state for most of the holiday time.  But then, yesterday was laundry day, and there was extra laundry because of the previous two random-as-needed-washing-only weeks.

And though the kitchen could have been worse, it could have been muuuucccchhhhh better.

And there were/are Christmas boxes out, ready for the re-filling, and they seem to be everywhere.  The middle of the living room, the middle of the dining room, and the middle of the office.

And I was overwhelmed.  

Yesterday, I washed and dried all of the clothes, but didn’t fold them all because I felt the urgency to work on the Christmas decor packing.

I ran the dishwasher, but didn’t sweep the kitchen because I kept thinking about that mountain of clothes on the loveseat waiting to be folded.

I was feeling disjointed and random and the things I did didn’t make any visual difference because of the things that I hadn’t done.

And my flabbergastivity was compounded by the time crunch I felt after adding in extra, very important things to my daily routine.

Today, I felt the same way.  Bible study, exercise, and focused learning time were over . . . and with the time I had for cleaning, I was certain it would be a repeat of yesterday.

It’s Tuesday.  I have to clean the bathrooms.  The bathrooms haven’t been cleaned in (at least) two weeks.  But I really want to mop them too, which means that I should mop the kitchen first.

So I went into the kitchen and realized that if I was going to mop, I needed to do the daily tasks first.  The ones like, you know, CLEAN the kitchen, sweep, and all that.

I took a deep breath and decided that I would do my daily tasks, even if it meant I couldn’t get to my weekly ones like cleaning the bathroom.  The kitchen looking like it did was making me miserable and caused me to feel like no matter what I did, my house was a total disaster.

And of course, due to neglect, the daily tasks for the kitchen took longer than if they had been . . . well . . . actual daily tasks.

Once the kitchen was clean, I felt physically and mentally much better.  And even the Christmas boxes strewn throughout the rest of the house didn’t seem as daunting.  No longer was the whole house a disaster.

Those daily tasks, they’re amazing things.

And it turned out that I did have time to mop the kitchen.  And clean the bathrooms.