The Top of the Table

Tom announced a week or so ago that he’d like 2016 to be the year of organization in our household.

I agreed that it was a lovely goal. Then we celebrated Christmas by bringing MORE things into our house. Sigh.

So we decided to start small. We wanted to clean off the dining table, stop it from being a catch-all for mail, school papers, random dental files, you name it, it was probably on our table.

We actually eat at that table and so it’s a pain the butt to have to move crap each time we sit down to eat.

So yesterday, I cleaned the table. And it stayed clean all day long. I know!! I can’t even imagine it either and yet there it was, clutter-free.

We’ll see how it goes this evening when I get home and clean out Olivia’s school folder, which always has stuff in the “Stays home” side. The “Back to School” side is rarely as full as that other side.

But the table was the only thing I managed to declutter yesterday. And today brings work and school and regularly scheduled programming. Alas, I will still need to find a way to fit a bit of decluttering into all that.

Because the area by the garage door needs attention. The corner in the living room is desperate for someone to go through and purge that crap.

There are so many other areas of the house that need to be cleaned/decluttered/burned down and rebuilt.

Don’t even get me started on the master bedroom. Yikes!

But instead of doing all that yesterday, I snuggled under three blankets on the couch and dozed while the girls sat with me and played either together or separately on their various electronics. Yep, mom fail and house-keeping fail all in one swoop.

But it was only one day. The date on the calendar doesn’t dictate to us when we can make changes. So there’s always tomorrow for cleaning and decluttering. There’s tomorrow to start that new diet and try to exercise a little more than not at all.

We’ll get there or we won’t but we won’t let decluttering get in the way of actually living. There are still Junie B. Jones books to be read, dinner to be cooked and eaten, baths to be taken and laughed to be shared. Those things are more important that putting away the seventy thousand pairs of shoes piled by the back door (of which two pairs are Olivia’s, two pairs are Tom’s and the rest belong to someone who will not be names but her name is not Mom…)

For now, I'm going to enjoy being able to see the top of my kitchen table.