Operation Sanity Part 2B: More Drops of Sanity (Out of Sight, Out of Mind)

If you missed parts one and two of this little series, be sure to click on the links below to check them out.

Without further ado, here is another little tidbit of sanity we have added to our home in the past couple months:

5. Out of sight, out of mind. This point requires a post all unto itself because it has completely changed the look and feel of our house.

I super duper love little organized and labeled containers. Sweet Hubby makes fun of my housekeeping because, while the room itself may be covered in clutter and dust bunnies and unfolded clothes, the closets are immaculately organized. Matching baskets, labeled plastic shoeboxes ($.99 at WalMart and my absolute favorite size/style storage box. I seriously might own 50.) So in my perfect playroom and child's bedroom, there is a shoebox for Barbies. One for Legos. One for doll clothes. One for small figurines. One for cars. One for tea sets. One (or five) for doll house accessories. And they would all be neatly labeled - preferably with pictures of the items contained. Ahhh...

But my kiddos are less inclined to utilizing storage containers, and more inclined to dumping out every. single. box. to find the one toy that doesn't match any of the labels. And even more inclined to just throwing the toys back into any random box they see fit and completely ignoring the labels that were so painstakingly photographed, laminated, and decoupaged to the box.

I'm not bitter. Really.

So after multiple attempts at what felt like brainwashing (you will love the $.99 shoe boxes... you will admire and respect the labels...) I gave up. Toys now go in a central location that looks like a dump but that can be hidden by a door or lid. See more about that process in part one.

And once my storage-container-loving heart grasped the amazing awesomeness of the "out of sight, out of mind" concept, great things began to happen.

Examples:

- I hate doing dishes at night. Seriously, when dinner is over, the table cleared, baths given, bedtime stories read, water delivered, covers tucked, and kiddos asleep... this mama is DONE for the night. So every morning, I wake up to a sink full of dirty, crusty, day-old dishes. Ugh. The quick fix? HIDE the dishes in soapy water. Out of sight, out of mind. Mountains of soap suds are actually pleasant to look at, and the dishes are so much easier to wash the next morning.

-   Ok, Friends fans, remember Monica's closet? I totally have one of those. It's for items that don't have a home or whose home is in our attic. Like the big glass Santa Clause plate that somehow missed the departure date of all the other Christmas paraphernalia. Or those last few items of winter clothes that were in the bottom of the dirty clothes basket when all the other winter clothes were neatly stored in tidy, labeled boxes and put in the attic. Or decorative items we don't actually need and I will eventually take to Goodwill. Or the random cables and cords that we haven't used in two years but that I'm sure, upon throwing them out, we would discover are indispensable to the use of some valuable appliance or electronic. All of these items (and many more) were constantly floating around my home, in random boxes or under random cabinets. Now they are in a central, unorganized, chaotic location... that is completely unseen behind the solid wood door. Once every couple months, Sweet Hubby pulls out the items that belongs in our attic and puts them in their appointed boxes, thereby clearing space for any other random pieces of junk household items that need temporary storage. In the meantime: Out of sight, out of mind. Perfection.

-  When having people over for dinner, dishes that were dirtied in the cooking process go in a plastic bin on top of the fridge to be washed after the shindig is over. She cooked this huge dinner and has no dirty dishes in her sink? How does she do that? Out of sight, out of mind. That's how, friends. (Note: Just don't forget you put them up there, only to remember a week later when you're wondering what that smell is and you can't find your frying pan. Ya know, not that I've ever done that.)

I have a plethora of other examples, but I think I have exposed my home's hidden places enough for one post.

What about you? Do you have any "out of sight, out of mind" places in your home? Do you love them or hate them? Tips? Comments? Random bits of trivia? Let me know!

Catch Up:

Operation Sanity: Girl Stuff (part 1)

Operation Sanity Part 2A: Little Drops

Operation Sanity Part 2A: Little Drops

One of my favorite things in the world is to watch colors swirl in water. When we dye Easter eggs, we use clear mugs, mainly because I love to watch that single drop of food coloring twist and flow and spread itself so far that the entire liquid changes in appearance.

My morning routine goes like this: coffee, then creamer. Never the other way around. Because there is something so soothing and visually melodic about watching the cream disappear beneath the surface of the black and reemerge in its milky tan spiral as I stir.

I love it... it soothes my heart.

Let's call that endearingly quirky instead of super weird, mmkay?  

I bring this up because our family has recently added a few drops of sanity into the otherwise chaotic waters of life, and the resulting color change has been magnificent. These are small changes. Insignificant. When I tell you about them, you will say, "That's it?" And I will say, "Ah... but watch it swirl."

So without further buildup (because, seriously, these are minor, minor changes), here are our little drops of sanity:

1. I threw away my kids socks. Matching  up socks is the bane of my existence. Seriously. I hate it. Hence, socks rarely got matched. I cannot tell you how many mornings went in the red zone (interpreted: everybody screaming in a panic because we're so late the school day might actually be finished by the time we get there) because I was digging through a basket of socks trying to find that one pink sock with the green stripes that I knew had been sitting on top of the pile the night before but now had disappeared into the heart of the mountain, never to be seen or heard from again. So one day a few months ago, I blindly threw them all in the trash in a fit of sock rage I methodically gathered them up and disposed of them without uttering one single curse word. Then I went to Target and invested in three packs of the exact. same. socks. My girls are close enough in age that they can share socks, and I have matched nary a pair since that day. Socks go in a central location, and when mommy says "Get your socks on," the girls know to grab one for each foot and proceed to don said respective feet. The end. No more matching. No more digging through baskets. No more cursing under my breath at that @#$(&% missing pink sock airing out my sock frustration in a perfectly healthy, Christian way.

2. The girls tidy their rooms every morning. Who woulda thunk that adding yet another item to the laundry list that is the morning routine would be in any way peaceful? But, oh my word, I love it. We started by spending some time in each room, pruning and organizing. This was not as drastic as it sounds. I put each girl's toys in one big container/box/basket in their respective rooms (more on this in Part 1). We also created space for their "treasures" (tiny scraps of paper, flower petals, stones, and dried play-doh that appear to the naked eye as trash but are, in fact, priceless childhood possessions that, if ever missing, will cause massive weeping and wailing and gnashing of the teeth of tiny little females). Maple has a small desk with a drawer. Chloe (who has significantly more tiny treasures) has a shelf above her bed and her two bedside table drawers. We also put a laundry hamper in each room for - you guessed it - laundry. So every morning, the girls take two minutes (usually while mommy is watching cream swirl and doing likewise productive things) to put everything back in its place. And since we do it every morning, it has never taken more than two minutes. Ahhhh....

3. The girls make their own beds. And I don't fix them. Not even Maple's bed. Which is made up by Maple. Who is three. As much as it goes against my control-freak nature, I have never, not once, corrected or "remade" the beds after they are finished. And you know what I see on their faces when they're finished? Pure and unadulterated pride. They are so proud of their clean rooms and made up beds! If there is a morning that I take for granted that it's been done, Maple pulls on my elbow (which inevitably spills that first sip of coffee) and says: "Hey mommy, wanna come see my woom?" Sparkly eyes are so much better than perfect sheets. And semi-spread beds are so much better than wadded up blankets in the floor.

4. We speed clean. My kiddos are notorious slowpokes. Whether it's getting dressed or eating or cleaning up, neither one has a hurry bone in her little body. So our cleanup time was often peppered with "if this toy is still here the next time I come in here" or "I'm not going to say it again" or "how many times do I have to step on a lego before you realize your mother needs both her feet and maybe you should pick them up!?"  Until flylady saved the day.
I have tried flylady methodology in the past, and I just can't seem to wrap my ADHD cleaning brain around the concept. But one thing that stuck is the timed cleanup. If a task seems too overwhelming to even start, I tell myself, "I'll work for 15 minutes (or 30 or 45 or whatever), and when that time is up, I'm done, regardless of the condition of the task." Most of the time I finish the task before my timer goes off. Sometimes I am so engrossed in the task I don't even hear the timer and end up finishing it anyways. Occasionally I leave the task when the timer goes off and do another timed cleaning the next day. It works for me. I love it.
So I tried it with my kids. I started timing their cleanup. And it worked! What I love about this is that there is no nagging or begging or threatening. They just spring into gear!
Note:  I don't say "If you're not done by the time I count to 3..." Instead, it sounds more like, "Hey kiddos! I bet we can get this cleaned up in 30 seconds! Ready... set... GO!" And I count to 30.  Also: I don't use a timer. Something about the sound of my voice counting helps the girls stay on task, and I can speed up or slow down the counting as needed if a task is taking less or more time than the allotted 30 seconds. I also have a really big mouth, so I can yell my counting from whatever room I happen to be in. 

I have more little drops of sanity, but this post is already a kajillion miles long. Kudos to those of you who stuck through it. I shall attempt to come back soon and finish up! Love y'all bunches!

Operation Sanity: Girl Stuff (part 1)

It has been 10 days since I wrote about using business skills in my homemaking efforts.

I actually started this process a couple weeks before writing about it, as the Lord was prompting my heart to see this whole SAHM thing as a long-term gig.

It's going swimmingly; so I thought I'd give you a few updates. 

From hence forth, any such attempts shall be part of the larger production: Operation Sanity.

So after making a kajillion and one lists, Operation Sanity began with one project: Girl Stuff.

Girl Stuff is all the pink and purple and polka dot and rainbow and sparkly things that take over my house.  This includes toys, shoes, clothes, hair bows, pillows, bags, books, and DVD's. But mainly toys (because if I step on one more lego....)

Seriously... this stuff was EVERYWHERE! Especially between 5pm on Friday and 8am on Monday. It goes like this: On Friday at 5pm, the last of the parents pick up their wee ones from my house. Enter Hurricane Girls Gone Wildly Messy (HGGWM). It rips through my house and leaves me with a FEMA-worthy destruction site by the time Chloe gets on the bus on Monday mornings.

It took me all day Monday (every Monday) to put things back in place... mainly because I had lost the use of my feet after stepping on shards of piercing shiny plastic torture devices (aka, legos).

I have tried many toy-organization systems in the past. Most recently, we divided toys into 5 containers and rotated the containers every couple days. My only rule was that each container had x number of toys. So if they wanted to keep and play with a toy out of container 1, then they had to pick a toy from container 2 to put back, etc. We ended up with four containers full of toys nobody wanted, and one container full of I-will-fight-you-to-the-death-for-these-because-every-single-one-is-my-very-favorite-toy toys.

It was all downhill from there.

So, about three weeks ago, after a particularly harrowing weekend of HGGWM and I-will-fight-you-to-the-death interventions, I decided to get drastic(ish). I put all the toys in one huge pile in our living room. Then I had the girls take turns picking which toys they wanted. Maple's picks were labeled with an "M," and Chloe's toys were labeled with a "C." (I'm nothing, if not creative.)  The only toys not labeled were legos, kitchen accessories (that go with their play kitchen), books, and dollhouse furniture. 

The rules go like this:  

1. 

 Your toys stay in your room. 

Only the four categories listed above (legos, kitchen, books, dollhouse) may stay in the play area, in their designated spaces. 

2.  

You MAY share your toys with your sister...

 but if a fight breaks out, the toy goes to the person whose initial is on it. 

3. 

I will ask you to pick up your toys once. 

After that, they will be transported to an undisclosed location to be returned to you upon completion of one chore - the time and task to be determined by yours truly.

I also ditched the idea of keeping the toys in small, categorized containers (another system we have tried in the past, to no avail). Because Chloe chose mostly small figurines and Barbies, she throws all her toys in a large wooden toy box in her room. Because Maple chose mostly stuffed animals and dolls, she tosses her toys in the bottom of her closet. Neither place is pretty, but both can be hidden (behind a lid or a door) and thereby completely ignored by mommy. (Adapting an out-of-sight-out-of-mind mindset is another part of my new sanity plan. Perhaps I'll write more on that later.)

It's only been three weeks, but I think that has given me enough time to claim that this has been BY. FAR. the most successful toy organization system we have ever used. It goes perfectly hand-in-hand with the new "speed cleans" (which I shall write about in another post), and there have been no tears over toy-sharing in three. weeks.  (Can I get a witness?! ThankyouJesus!!)

Of course, being sisters, the girls have found new things to fight over. But any argument that starts with toys ends with one question: Whose initials are on the toy? The. End.  No more whining (about toys). No more tattling (about sharing). And no more threatening to take away every toy you own because some children have no toys and would love to have as many as you have and you should just choose another of your kajillion toys instead of fighting over the one that's in your sister's hand!  

But mainly, I haven't stepped on any legos. ThankyouJesus!!