Welcome back to the work week! How was your weekend?
Things were pretty low key around here other than the fact that I'm trying desperately to organize my life and my home a bit which is proving a challenge! I'm getting busier all the time with my business (hooray!) and I'm finding I'm needing more childcare than I've had over the last few months. It's not easy to find flexible daycare options in Toronto. Here, once you've peed on the stick and got the positive pregnancy result, you immediately rush to your computer to fill out the registration forms and pay the deposit fees for a variety of daycares so that you can get on the waiting list and hopefully get a spot for when your child turns 1 and you're heading back to work (mat leave in Canada is 1 year...I know we're very lucky). After you've filled those out and dished out a considerable amount of cash, then you plot the ways you can tell your hubby that you're expecting! Maybe I'm exaggerating a teeny bit, but not much. So here I am with a 19 month old needing flexible care and it's the first time I've looked into it. Gulp! Fingers crossed I can find something soon.
Do you have a secret for feeling organized and on top of your game? If you do, man oh man would I like to hear about it! From what I gather, the secret to happiness, especially post-baby, is giving in to the fact that there will be chaos and there will be clutter in life. Everywhere. In your home, in your mind, in your purse. I'm trying to get my head around this concept, but I'm finding it a bit hard. Needless to say, I'm struggling!
It's no surprise to me that what I find most overwhelming and the biggest cause of stress is a messy house. I'm here all the time, both in a family capacity and a business one too. If I'm working on a project that has me looking at beautiful images of gorgeous homes and luxurious furnishings and look up from my screen to see the place littered with sippy cups and library books, shoes and electronics charges, I start to lose it. I lose it then I immediately proceed to self-beration for not being more on-top of things. This feeling reminds me of the article I mentioned a few weeks ago from the Globe that discussed how women are now measuring their self worth by the state of their home. I'm thinking I fit nicely into that described box!
I've been reading up on organization over the past few days and have found pretty consistent advice from the women who have blogs devoted entirely to the subject. They all seem to agree that a little bit every day is the ticket to maintaining order and preventing chaos. That makes plenty of sense, it's just a matter of finding the 15 - 30 extra minutes in the day that they recommend where taking care of the house tops the priority list. When you're at home with a child you rely exclusively on nap time to do everything you need to do. Work, shower, exercise, clean, cook...whatever. Thirty minutes is a pretty big bulk of time. I'm trying to do it though. Today, for example, I took all of our DVDs (we had about 250) and removed them from their cases and put them into DVD sleeves inside binders. Despite the guilt I felt for throwing all of those cases the way of landfill, it has cleared up some considerable space in our TV room. I didn't go so far as to organize them by genre or alphabetically or anything as organized as that (that's crazy talk), but I love seeing more free space in my home. Now, instead of digging through piles of cases, I just have to flip through one of 5 binders to find what I'm interested in.
It is amazing how calming the process of purging and de-cluttering can be. Don't get me wrong, the actual task isn't so fun, but the result is addictive. You can get rid of 50% of your clothes, but I'm telling you, once you see your cleared out closet, you'll want to get rid of more. It's a very liberating feeling, and can actually make you feel like you have more stuff because everything you have, you use. Do you have that feeling?
So tell me, dear readers, do you have any strategies that you use that help you feel like your in control of the clutter and the chaos? What techniques do you use to keep yourself organized and one step ahead of the next mess. I would love to know, and I bet lots of other people would too!
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Design Mom