No rest for the laundress

I vowed I would not go to bed tonight until the heinous mess of laundry in our basement was sorted, folded, and delivered to its proper owners/drawers.  It has been such a couple of weeks, that laundry hasn't had a regular "pace" for some time.

Now it is 11:15 and the only thing that equals my fatigue is my frustrations with the state of our home.  Floors are crying out for vacuuming and sweeping. Walls and doorframes need wiping, and my shower hasn't been scoured in more than a month. The library is messy, dusty, and out of order.






My mind drifts forward to homeschooling? Can I do this? Almost every article I read about homeschooling declares that the path of homeschooling demands a you happily embrace a less than tidy home--littered with projects and schoolwork.

Uh-oh.

I don't do chaos.

Can I buck that trend and have an organized homeschool? Can I homeschool my kids without popsicle stick projects and glitter?

For now, I can't tackle that. For now, I have to get up tomorrow, run 3 miles, teach Spanish, and just wipe as many doorframes as I can.  We will survive to the end of the year. . . even if my shower doesn't get scrubbed until June.

Thinking Outside the Kitchen Cabinet

Plates to the left. Cups on the right. Stack the bowls above. There seems to be a secret code of uniformity in cabinet organization. But, when you have a family of five squeezed into a 2 bedroom apartment, sometimes you have to buck the code. Especially when homeschooling is involved. I have three cabinets in which to fit dishes, crafts, cookbooks, homeschooling books, Presidential flashcards, assorted workbooks, and a lengthy list of assorted ribbons, learning tools, and paper towel tubes I am sure are good for something brilliant.
Solution? Simplify. And move the dishes. I let the kids each pick "their" bowl, plate, and cup, and set them in the drying rack. Every other dish I stacked and stowed below in the cabinet that was formerly a catch-all for everything crafty. Now, those are the only dishes we use. We eat. We wash. We stack. We repeat. That leaves the most accessible cabinets available for things I really need, like a Rapunzel coloring book or science kit. At first it was really odd opening the cabinets and seeing a bowl of beads and some popsicle sticks, but it is proving to be a fantastic idea. Cleanup is easier because we do it immediately after we eat. I always have an empty dishwasher for any big items since everything else is getting washed right away. The kids wash their own dishes (and the surrounding counters sometimes) and my craft supplies are less jumbled. Awesomeness.
The takeaway? Life (and kitchen cabinets) can only be lived one way: Your Way. I want crayons in my kitchen cabinet? Perfect. My sister in law has ribs on Thanksgiving? Fabulous. I use scissors to cut my pancakes? Ingenious. We aren't here to figure out how to live our lives the way other people do. We are here to figure out how we will take this body, this mind, this house, and this life and create something absolutely uniquely completely us--and allow everyone else to do the same. Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm going to use an IKEA bag clip to fix my daughter's hair. Is that a problem?