does clutter = love?

Whew! Where did the week go? I am sorry I haven’t sat down to write in almost a week! Well it’s not because I don’t have anything going on – certainly I have thought up things to write about daily, but have not gotten threw the clutter in my kitchen long enough to actually do it.

So let’s start with that… I have to admit I am a clutter phoebe. I hate messes. Piles. Stuff. However, second on my very short list of life skills my parents did nothing to prepare me for is clutter control. I just have no idea what to do with it.

Because clutter causes me so much unrest and because I live with three busy little people who could put my dad to shame in the amount of clutter that just follows them around – I spend a lot of my time picking-up, sorting, and transferring stuff around my house.

Yesterday at 4:30pm when I had done my best to ignore it for most of the day, I decided it was time to put away some laundry. Not just because there was a basket of folded  laundry waiting to be delivered to the closets, but because I needed the basket.

Once I had the towels put away and matched up a few socks that had escaped from the pack, I had myself an empty container. I then walked around the whole house and looked for anything that was out of place, especially if I didn’t know where its place should be. I put every last item in the basket and then moved to the next room.

Anna Mae saw what I was doing and alerted the boys who ran around ahead of me putting toys away, so that they would not end up in the basket. That in and of itself was a good thing. As the time for dinner neared I realized that I was not going to get it all put away before the end of the day.

Last night was my big chance to do some much needed “all by myself” shopping so that I don’t get fired from parenthood on Sunday morning – if you know what I mean. So the basket was left until today to sort through. Needless to say it took the entire morning – including Grace’s best nap to get through it, but I can now proudly say that I can see my kitchen counter and my laundry basket is again filled with laundry. I was feeling pretty proud of this, until I returned the basket to the laundry room and realized that the top of the dryer was full of  more STUFF!

Oh well – it’s a short lived victory and I will hide from the laundry room today and get some writing done. I’m sure that someday the kids will be grown and gone and I will have an immaculate house and while my clutter anxiety will be less, I’ll miss them — Perhaps that’s why mom’s house is still filled with a bit of clutter – is it her way of saying she misses us and likes having us around? Now how sweet is that?