This is how I describe my method of straightening up the house. Whenever I’m leaving a room to go into another one, I first look around to see if there’s anything laying around that belongs at my destination. Even if I pick up and put away just one small item at a time, if I do this over and over as I move throughout the house, it’s remarkable how good it looks at the end of the day.
When the house is really messy, I do this on a larger scale, using a laundry basket. As I’m cleaning a room, I put anything that doesn’t belong there into the basket, so I can put everything away all at once. This is a very efficient method of cleaning because it saves time and energy – both of which I’m lacking nowadays.
Organizing experts say that you can avoid major clean-ups simply by having a place for everything, and putting things away as soon as you’re finished with them.
Right. And these “experts” clearly do not have small children, or they would know that the majority of the stuff I pick up each day does not belong to me, nor am I responsible for it being out. Also, some of it doesn’t have a “place” in the house, because it doesn’t belong in the house to begin with. For example, the giant bouquet of sad, wilted dandelions left on the kitchen table by Cakes. Or the small pile of gravel (???) inexplicably resting on the hall table.
I’m positive that these underpants sitting next to the computer do not belong to me.
Last I checked, Wal-Mart didn’t carry Dora panties for 36-year-old women, and my butt hasn’t been that small since I was three (maybe two).
And this crap on the coffee table? Not mine either.
I recently mastered the art of drinking from a regular cup, so I don’t need to leave milk sitting around in a sippee cup for a week, until it’s sour and revolting and slides out of the cup in a solid chunk when my poor mother tries to load the dishwasher.
Oh, and I understand that people do not have arms coming out of their heads, or freakishly long fingers that look like tentacles, so I’m fairly certain that those drawings weren’t done by me either.
And the rock? Oh right, I must have forgotten to put that away in my neatly labeled “Miscellaneous Bits that I Found on the Driveway and Thought I Couldn’t Live Without” bin, along with a shard of broken glass, a dirty old toothpick, a dead beetle, an interesting-looking forked stick, and a Jello pudding box that fell out of the recycling barrel (seriously, these are the types of things my children unearth from who-knows-where and bring into the house).
Silly me. If only I had put that rock away when I was done with it, I wouldn’t be in this predicament.
