Taking back my house

 

Now that Emily is at school 4 mornings a week (it's actually just 2-1/2 hours each day so it's sounds like much more time than what it is), I am going to take back my house.  From whom you ask?  My kids.  Or maybe myself.  The answer might be both.  I saw this a while back on Pinterest and it might explain it best:


 I'd like to think we were just too busy doing fun stuff this summer to find the time to clean the house, but that's probably wrong.  It just didn't seem like it was worth the effort.  The only time the house was actually all clean and picked up was when we were all in bed.  I am the kind of person that likes organization and tidiness -  Did you hear that?  that was Tom coughing in the Ah-Hem! way that really means That's A Bunch ofCrap.  Let me finish, Tom.  What I was going to say is I am the kind of person that likes organization and tidiness most of the time.  I just take time off from that in the summer when the girls are home and I cry uncle to the chaos.  But now that they are busy making their teachers' lives miserable (I'm kidding!), I've got a little time to reacquaint my lazy self with my tidy self. 

 

I started today with mopping the floors.  Our carpets look almost new thanks to Tom's hard work this past weekend, so that just made the hard floors look even filthier.  After I mopped the kitchen, I looked at the water I was using for mopping and debated whether to change it already after one room.  Unfortunately I was using a blue bucket and not a grey one so there was no excuse for the water to be that grey and so I had to change it.  Yuck!  Next up was the laundry room/mud room.  I can always gauge when this room needs to be mopped by when I begin to ask myself if the 5 second rule applies to clean socks that are dropped on the floor when I get them out of the dryer. 

 

While I was in that room I finally turned my attention to the lockers I've been ignoring all summer.  Yes, we are fortunate enough to have wood lockers custom built for all 4 of us by my dad.  And while all of you are pinning these fantastic ideas for your mud rooms that look like this:

 

 

 

 

The reality looks more like this (in our house anyway):

 

See the vintage sign near the ceiling in the Pinterest mud room?  We have one, too :)

 

 

The girls use their lockers more as a target of which direction to throw their stuff when they run in from outside instead of actually placing the shoes in the cubbies or hanging their stuff up on the little hooks.  They need to be re-painted, but vacuuming out all the grass and dirt from the back corners helped achieve my goal for today.

 

I've always have a big to-do list when school starts and usually I'm scrambling to finish it days before school ends in May.  But not this year. (I say this every year)   I'm doing some more consulting work which will keep me busy, too, but I will find time to get my projects around here done.  I love the feeling of checking things off lists. 

Oh, and checking things off lists?  Here's one:

 

 

We've taken the gate off the bottom of the stairs.  Emily is getting better at keeping her balance on the steps so we're crossing our fingers on this one.  Keep yours crossed, too - I'd hate to be posting about a broken body party as a result of falling down the stairs!