7 Quick Takes #24 RE: Jen’s Organizational Hacks For Everyone Else

7 Quick Takes this Fridiaaaa with Jen & Co.

–1–

All of my energy for the week maxed out last night as I have been thrice bitten by a spider, and the resulting panic/anxiety/INSANITY left me vacuuming/scrubbing/laundering/spraying/picking up the house in a way that rivals a nesting 40 week pregnant mother. Craig took the boys and left me to my madness for an hour. It was great to rage clean, uninterrupted.

–2–

But if you stopped by Bumpy Bridge today, you’d never know I lifted a finger.

–3–

I cannot, as I imagine neither can anyone else, keep up with blogs, news and the media. I follow my faves and scan-read here and there throughout the day on my mobile as I’m rocking/nursing a baby or letting the boys eat dirt outside. Jen wrote about the realities of household organizing this week. It’s always a fresh breeze of air when mothers tell the truth: Martha Stewart is for crazy people.
She didn’t really write that, but for people like her and I, attempting to have a staged house is the height of insanity.

–4–

My biggest struggle, since getting married and living in a house with FOUR BOYS (like when Rachel moves out and Monica cries, “..and I have to live with a BOY!“), is keeping the house in any form of order. At all.
I am not she who sings “done is better than perfect.”
To me, if it’s not perfect, then it’s not done.
And it’s never perfect, so it’s never done.
And if, by an act of God, I get something done perfectly, you betcha those boys are like flies to a cow patty all over that.
So I have this running inner dialogue with myself bantering back and forth trying to cope with the seemingly oppressive clutter, laundry and crumbs.
Most of the time, myself and I agree to settle it over coffee, convincing ourself that the size of the mess reflects the size of ideas and deep, deep –I mean DEEP— profound thoughts dancing about my brain.
GENIUS.
It’s a mess, because you’re a GENIUS, Carolyn. Brilliant. Glad that’s settled, then.
Dost one see the vicious hamster wheel of lunacy I’ve placed myself upon? squeak, squeak, squeak…huff, huff, huff…

–5–

An example: We have a small solarium and that’s where our shoes are deposited. So there I shall have shoes and dirt. MMM, MM! Do those boys love the whole idea of that. Toys? Nah.
So for many months it was the task of simply lining up the shoes to make it appear orderly. Over and over and over and over again, because as soon as they were lined up, guess who always came for a visit?

This photo is pre-Collin dayz.  Yummy. Rolling in shoes which tread through parking lots and public bathrooms…

–6–

Okay, months later, I says to myself: THEES NO WURK. I hauled from the basement one day, driven again by a cleaning rage, an extremely heavy, metal shelf-type thing: I placed shoes along the bottom rack, thinking if they saw that the shoes had a “home” the boys would certainly allow the shoes to live there. It seemed like a great idea. However, the boys loved that even more. Now they could climb AND play amongst the dirt and the shoes.

–7–

My mother -my BRILLIANT mother- offered the idea a few days ago that perhaps if the shoes were out of reach, they would remain there. See? I can’t even get my brain to travel that far. So, during yesterday’s rage clean, I hacked away at some cardboard boxes and voila.
Here’s my Martha Stewart Living for yas:

Yes, the larger box AND the overflow belong to my husband.