Should, but Not

It is Friday, and I should be:

• Washing the floor
• Assembling portfolios
• Cooking freezer meals
• Folding Laundry
• Calling about my mixed-up computer
• Cleaning up Christmas decorations
• Bathing the dog
• Paying bills
• Lots, lots more

But instead I have been doing this:

I love my life!

By the way, Molly Bang (creator of the book we are reading in that photo) is one of my absolute favorite children's book authors. The Yellow Ball, with all of its 12 or so words and its beautiful soft chalk illustrations, won my heart the first time we flipped through it during our Five In A Row studies. It is just so gently paced. Mrs. Bang is one very talented woman. If you haven't seen her books, I encourage you to take a look.

Morning Routine

I love lists. They are full of good intentions and order.

I love my kids too ... but the kids will never be mistaken for being orderly. They are, after all, kids. And second to speaking at ear-drum bursting decibels, they specialize in mess making.

A perfectly organized home isn't realistic, but I am determined to fight for basic cleanliness and functionality. My best weapon is our routine.

Our day can start at any hour, thanks to my husband's work responsibilities, so a strict schedule really doesn't work for us. But a routine is different from a schedule. A routine is a list (ahh, feel the order already?) of things that we do in the same order every day regardless of the time that we start.

The kids each have their own morning routine chart. I make new ones every year and I customize them so that the things that tend fall through the cracks will get caught. For a while we had "turn off your bedroom lights" on the list - pathetic I know, but it saved me from having to remind one particular child that this is mandatory.

Right now the odd-ball assignment on the kids' routines is "pick up hangers." We were somehow getting into the habit of leaving empty hangers strewn all over the bedrooms. Not pretty, so it went on the list. It hasn't solved the problem completely, but I do see progress.

The kids' lists are laminated and have velcro dots so that they can "check" off each task as it is done. Some are static, like "brush your teeth," but other tasks change daily. The "Clean Zone" task is one that works really well for us. When the kids are little I assign which zone they are to focus on in their room every morning. One day it will be cleaning the floor of their closet, and another day they will have to change their sheets.

As the kids get older, they are responsible for telling me what one thing they think they should focus on cleaning in their room each day. (Note: They CAN in fact see what needs to be cleaned. This was an eye opening discovery for me.) I am hoping that eventually this training in seeing what needs to be tidied will pay off in eternally clean rooms ... yeah, I'm dreaming, but it is a nice dream.

Even the 2 year old has her own list. She delights in moving the check marks after she completes each task. Granted, she can't reach her own clothes or squirt her own toothpaste, so she requires help, but she knows exactly what to do every morning.

I love the quote, "Don't expect what you won't inspect."

Oh, so convicting and very true.

So, what am I doing while the kids accomplish their morning routine? I am standing in the hallway folding laundry (A good routine for myself. It keeps it to a manageable heap). I am available to reach high objects, remind dawdlers that they have only x amount of time left, and to ensure that the checked tasks are, in fact, completed. When they are done they stick their chart to my dryer using the magnet I attached to the back.

My goal is to add at least one task to our morning routine every year. At the same time, I also plan to drop something each year too. They do not always need to be reminded to wear underwear. Once it is a habit, it is dropped from the list. Eventually they will be proficient in the obvious, and will be doing that laundry for me, so I will be able to pick up another task to do while supervising them.

When I am diligent at making sure we follow our routine I can feel the change in our home. We are dressed, the upstairs is tidied, and the kids are ready for school.

Not a bad way to start the day.

Little Fingerprints

We have only one step separating my dining room from the rest of the house, yet we should have installed a railing; a cute little railing at exactly 2 feet high. Because we don't have this railing, my youngest, who is still very unsteady on stairs, uses the wall to steady herself.

Did I mention that this step separates the dining room from the rest of the house? The dining room is the space where people eat messy things like spaghetti or work on great finger-painted masterpieces.

There are sinks in several locations throughout the rest of the house, but to get to any of them you need to go up that stair.

I get to wash my wall a lot.

It reminds me of a favorite poem by Edgar Guest ~

Home ain't a place that gold can buy or get up in a minute;

Afore it's home there's got t' be a heap o' livin' in it;

Within the walls there's got t' be some babies born, and then

Right there you've got t' bring 'em up t' women good an' men;

And gradjerly, as time goes on, ye find ye wouldn't part

With anything they ever used - they've grown into yer heart:

The old high chairs, the plaything, too, the little shoes they wore

Ye hoard; an' if ye could ye'd keep the thumb-marks on the door.

- excerpt from "Home"

I'm keeping a few thumb-marks . . . but I'd still like that railing.

Filing aka. Hiding the Mess

This time of year always finds me filing. I love to be organized, although you wouldn't know it by looking at my kitchen counters on most days.

I like the newness of taking all of last years bills and financial statements, boxing them up and having them ready and waiting for tax day. More than that, I like to put all of our school documents back in order. It gives me time to look at our accomplishments and know that really, we have made progress - it is easier to see it in hindsight. It also gives me a chance to compare where we are to my original goals for the year and tweak things as needed.

This year I decided that we need more handwriting practice and fun games to help with my daughter's visual processing problems. Easy fix.

I have some serious organizational challenges though. I know, I know - join the club right?

• First - We are home almost ALL of the time, pulling things out, using them, and simply doing life. I can tidy, but things won't stay that way for long.
• Second - We need to do school from here, which means that we have many books and supplies that need to be accessed every day, but they are plain ugly to look at and need to be kept hidden away.
• Third - We have a toddler in the house. Enough said.

In a perfect world, I would have empty floors, countertops and desks. I don't even really like most decorations. I'm not technically a minimalist because it is just too modern for me, but empty surfaces are my preference, even if they aren't my reality.

So, with 3 kids I am finding myself needing to find ways to organize myself and keep all of our supplies hidden at the same time. Here are a few of my favorite tools:

My kitchen - I know, the kitchen isn't a tool, it is a room, but in our house it functions as our school room on most days. We have a real school room upstairs, but it is just too far removed from the hustle and bustle of our daily lives. My husband was thoughtful enough to add a few hidden spaces for our kids, which are almost as fun as his MacGyver Cabinet. A chalkboard is under a decorative cabinet door (on the non-functional end of my counter) and a magnet board is under another. These will be something we outgrow eventually, but for now they keep "treasures" handy but out of sight.

I keep my calendar inside an upper cabinet door, and a clipboard holding my grocery list and other to-do items inside another, so we can simply close the door on lots of our mess. In addition, I decided to sacrifice some cabinet space to my schooling sanity. Canned goods and any specialty dishes were all moved to the basement. In their place I keep the kids books (math, phonics) and the manuals that I will need every day. Our audiobooks and CD player are hidden in a lower cabinet, right beside my laminator and paper cutter. Neat and easy access.

Ottomans - Yeah, I know these aren't technically filing tools either, but they are great for hiding messes and they function as extra seating at the same time. I have 3 and they are all full of our supplies. One contains our binders and books, another has math manipulatives, and the third contains files for our upcoming units with lap-book elements, project supplies and any printouts that I need, all organized theme. In fact, one of these ottomans is right by our front door and I've never had a single person peek inside. (Okay now that I posted that I know some of you are dying to open up all of the ottomans in my house - go for it. Why not.)

Binders - Workbook pages (you know, the dreaded math and language arts) are all pulled out of their bindings, 3 hole punched, and put into a binder. I hand the kids the top page, and when they return it I put it immediately in the back of the book. In January I cull the excess and then at the end of the school year I have them help me choose their best work and we toss all but a few samples. I try really hard to not allow myself to have a "to be filed" category anywhere. It either has a home at the end of the day, or I toss it. Period.

So it isn't unusual to find me in a pile of papers, binders, and files during the month of January, attempting to make my life a bit more organized, but this ... well this is ridiculous:

I swear I didn't stage this photo. The dog just jumped in all by herself, spun in a circle and looked as if she was ready to settle in for a long nap. I don't know why. She is a strange little thing - cute but strange. Seriously, why would I file the dog with our homeschool materials?

Everyone knows that dogs go in the personal files!

Laundry List

Things have been hectic around our house. Between refinancing our home, beginning the school year, returning from vacation and dealing with a sick baby, the house has simply fallen apart from neglect.

While ironing in the WEE hours of the morning (2am to be precise), I was putting together a laundry list of things that I need to do in order to feel functional again. Then my sleep deprived brain got to wandering. ~ Why do we call it a laundry list? ~ Really, I know that laundry should probably always remain on top of that list, but is it bad enough to necessitate that the list be it's namesake?

So rather than do all of my many chores this morning (cuz' I'm great at procrastinating), I decided to research the term Laundry List. Here is what I found out:

It comes from the late nineteenth to early twentieth century when many sent their laundry out to be cleaned.

Columnist Ed Quillen who worked in a commercial laundry shop as a boy wrote in the Denver Post June 6, 2008, that the term refers to what must be listed when you send your laundry to a service, since 1) there were so many distinctions between different pieces of clothing for men, women, children, and various professions, and 2) the laundry service had to mark every individual piece of clothing per customer, sort into piles by color and water temperature, and ensure that all the pieces were returned to their proper owner.

A laundry list could be very personalized per customer, and might have been frequently re-used for loyal customers. Those with long laundry lists had more clothes and were probably more wealthy than others, and all their belongings would have been more difficult to track.

Through the years the term has come to mean any relatively long, detailed list of items.

source: Answers.com

Well, there it is. A laundry list is a long list.

Yup, that's what I have; a long list.

With laundry at the top of it.

Drat! Now that my research is done I need to find another way to procrastinate. Or maybe I should actually do a few things on that list. Decisions. Decisions.

A messier kind of normal

When you first have a baby helpful friends and family are constantly popping by with a meal or offering to help with kids or housework. I love these people. They are so generous and helpful. BUT. I think they have their timing wrong.

After 9 months of nesting, our houses are usually fairly tidy, including the medicine cabinet and the junk drawer (which, for some strange reason, biology dictated that we wake up at 2am to scrub and reorganize). We have also had time to plan ahead and the freezer is filled with yummy treats and nutritious meals.

"You must be so exhausted!" they all say, but to be honest, those first few weeks are a bit of a honeymoon unless the baby's birth was in some way extreme. For the first month baby sleeps a lot. They are incapable of rolling over, so they are conveniently tidy and generally adorable. As long as wacky hormones stay in check, things go along swimmingly.

Fast forward several months. The yummy treats are gone. Meals requiring many steps are replaced by sushi from the grocery store. The shiny clean medicine cabinet is now dumped into that junk drawer in a jumble of baby tylenol, safety pins, broken pencils, and several prescriptions that you no longer can tell from one another. And lets not mention the kitchen countertop or the dust bunnies under the beds.

Baby begins to crawl, climb and explore. They get into the laundry, pull toiletpaper off the roll, and knock over the milk. (My little one loves to put things away for me - but sometimes it just isn't very helpful to have someone pulling all of the folded laundry out of the pile and putting it back into the basket. I'm picky, I know.) They learn that they have preferences and learn to assert their will - refusing to get dressed or demanding that they be allowed to climb over the baby gate. Life just isn't as easy.

The newness has worn off in a good way too. Baby is now beginning to sleep on a schedule and a new kind of "normal" is settling in. But this normal is certainly not as clean or organized as the previous normal.

Wouldn't it be nice if the church committee that brings meals to new moms decided to save a few? They could bring those meals to the same moms when they arrive to church 4 (or 14) months later looking as if they forgot to brush their hair. Really - it is a needed ministry.

Clean Up

I've always had kids who love to take things out of boxes. This one is the exact opposite. She loves to put things away.
Check out how fast that block is moving. This is serious business.

Very helpful. Thanks Baby!

Mom's homework

I don't prioritize well.

I love to plan, to organize, to think about better ways to get things done, but when the rubber meets the road I really have a hard time getting the most important things done every day. Sadly I will often find myself thinking that I know what my values are, but my actions speak a different story.

Bible study is a prime example (housework is too, but that will have to wait for another post). I believe it is important. I really love it when I make time for it, but I somehow brush it off as "less critical" than the other busy tasks that fill my morning.

A few months ago I decided to scrap the Genesis study I've been working on for the past 2 years. It was well written, interesting, and in depth, but it was just too much me right now. I needed something that wasn't constantly distracting me with references, concordances, charts & timelines. I just need to study the Bible.

So then I tried simply sitting down each morning to read - which would work well if I didn't have 3 kids who seem to instinctively know that it was time to wake up at Exactly that moment. Despite my best efforts, they were perpetually pulling me away to resolve a squabble, for help in the bathroom, to clean up a spill, or a myriad of other urgent tasks. And when I wasn't distracted, I seemed to be reading through at lightning speed hoping to "get through it" before the next crisis, but not retaining anything. No, just reading wasn't going to work at this stage either - I needed something to help keep me focused.

So I decided to treat myself like one of my kids. I assigned myself copywork.

For the past 6 months I have spent time in the book of John, slowly working through each chapter as I copy it into a cheap-o spiral notebook. I mark it up when I feel like it, leave notes in the margin, and write myself questions. It is a fairly slow process, so I'm feeling as if I'm really paying attention to the words rather than just rushing through them. Occasionally I'll find a particularly baffling verse and I'll look it up, but mostly, I'm just sticking to the Bible. I can find my place when I'm pulled away, and I can see my progress every day.

Ha! This works!

But the truth still remains - I don't prioritize well, so it still isn't an every day habit. I wish it was because I really enjoy the process.

Those scribes really had a good thing going 2000 years ago.

The Battle of the Towel

In my house there are several things that I've had to surrender to my current family situation. For example, we no longer flit out for a quick trip to the store. Instead, it is an hour + excursion involving 3 car seats, packing a bag, and making sure that the timing works with everyone's sleep needs.

The cleanliness of our home has suffered too. I simply had to come to terms with the fact that kids play - and that they prefer to play with toys which have lots of pieces - and those toys seem to land everywhere. It isn't a big problem. My kids do clean up after themselves, but not in the way that adults do. The reality is this: A forgotten lego or a tiny doll shoe kicked in the corner isn't something that they will recognize as needing to be moved.

Another of the eternal battles in our home is the bathroom. My kids are great about washing their hands; before meals, after craft projects, or whenever it just seems like a fun thing to do. They have clean hands - but the bathroom has had a tendency to look as if it was hit with a fire hose. We have spots on the mirror and faucets from drippy hands, puddles tracing a line from the sink to the towel, and until recently we fought the battle-of-the-towel. We always had a towel either scrunched tightly between the towel bar and wall, or unceremoniously piled on the floor where it fell after a child failed to balance it properly in it's rightful place.

I never realized that towel balancing was a skill to be learned: A little too much pulled to the front and it slips off - a little too far back and the same result. We have lost this battle many times over.

So I decided to stop fighting.

I'm not sure where the idea came from, but in a moment of desperation (or maybe frustration) I picked up a pin and threaded it through the towel, anchoring it in place. It worked! No more towel on the floor!

So now, each time I replace our hand-towel, I get to pick a new pretty piece of (rarely worn) bling to show off. Problem solved: The towel is now stuck to it's bar - if they can't get if off, they don't have to replace it.

The jury is still out as to whether this look is completely tacky or not - but for now I don't care.

The kids will all eventually learn how to put a towel up so that it stays put. Later. Today, I'm just happy to have it off the floor. That's one less battle for me to fight.

Next I'll work on the magic solution for keeping the playroom floor clean.

Cleaning rust marks

{I've now received quite a few e-mails telling me that my blog has been hacked - the reality is that this really is me, Sheryl mom of 3 and wife to Pete, and I wrote this annoying product advertisement all by myself.  I'm the world's biggest goober.  But thanks to all of you who already read it - and a double thanks to those of you who were thoughtful enough to e-mail me.}

I'm not a huge fan of most cleaning products.  They usually do only part of what they claim to do.  **BUT** I have found the most amazing way to keep my toilets from getting those horrible red marks from our rusty well water.  (I know, I know . . . a whole post devoted to cleaning toilets - my life is SOOO thrilling.  Go ahead, laugh.)

I have been using Kaboom Scrub-Free for about a year now, and I have not had the nasty red marks return AT ALL.  Granted, I had to do a thorough cleaning to begin with - using pumice stone and lots of elbow grease, but it was worth it.  Seriously, every toilet in my house sparkles every day.  I'm loving this!  It is safe for my septic, only needs to be replaced a few times a year, and IT WORKS.  (I still  "swish" my toilets regularly, but I never have to scrub or use any chemicals, just the toilet brush)

On the box it says to replace it every three months.  I have found that it can go even longer in our house, but when I refill one toilet cleaner, I do them all.  It just makes it easier for me to remember.  I also don't use the stickers they provide the way they say to.  Instead of placing the sticker on my toilet tank (which is rather gaudy) I put it on my calendar on the day I think I will need to replace them as a reminder to check.  

Okay, so If you have made it this far you obviously have some toilets of your own that drive you crazy.  Go to the Kaboom website and they will send you one for FREE!  Do it!  I know you will thank me later.

~ End of Potty Talk you may return to your much more exciting life now.