My House...

...feels like one of these puzzle games.  The kind that I'm not very good at.  The kind that drives me crazy.

In this kind of game, when you want to move one square to a new space, you have to empty that space first.  And in the process of doing that to get one square to the correct area, you usually create a whole bunch of other problems by displacing all the other squares to deal with that one particular square!  You don't have a blank slate to work with--if you did, it would be easy to put the picture together correctly--but instead, your action upon one part of the picture affects many of the other pieces.

So it is with my house these days.

I've been in a major springtime/back-into-FlyLady/done-with-school/and-did-I-mention-I'm-pregnant nesting phase recently, and I'm having so much fun!!  Decluttering is addictive.  Cleaning, organizing, filling up the van with boxes of stuff to take to Gift & Thrift, occasionally lighting a fire in the woodstove to mostly burn up accumulated trash--all of this is pure delight to my soul.  :)

But there is a drawback: starting an organizing project in one area of the house inevitably leads to other projects somewhere else in the house--kind of like that silly puzzle game.  For example, this morning, I took all the books off two shelves of a bookcase in the kitchen and sorted out our science books to put back on one shelf and our history/social studies/biography/whatever else to put on the other shelf.  It was great fun, it reminded me of some books we have that I had forgotten about, it gave me even more ideas for the coming year of homeschooling--all good stuff.  I managed to actually finish organizing those two shelves, and they look MUCH better. 

However, I'm left with a pile of books (mostly short storybooks) that came off those shelves but don't belong there; now I need to find a new spot for them and integrate them into other bookshelves.  I also have a pile of Josiah's "paper treasures" that I need to sort through, put certain items into his scrapbook (which is just a 3-ring binder with a section for each year...I am so completely NOT a scrapbooker unfortunately), and discreetly burn most of the rest of the pile when Josiah's not looking.  :)  I also have some longer chapter books that need to go on the bookshelves in the boys' room (at least I know which bookshelf they should go on!), but to find room for them there necessitates a good cleaning/organizing of those shelves.  I also have a pile of books that I want to plug into my developing plan for Josiah's second grade year, so currently they are sitting on the glider rocker in my bedroom next to my laptop, waiting for me to find the time to sit down and type them into my Word doc before I put those books back on the original shelves in the kitchen.

That's just from organizing two shelves in the kitchen!  Don't even get me started on what I'm doing in the library (the perpetual messiest room of our house...well, not counting the garage, I guess), and how those changes ripple out and create other tasks that I must get to soon!!!

So here I am, playing that slightly infuriating puzzle game with my household stuff, trying to create space where there was none, making a bigger mess to try to develop order, sometimes getting in over my head with too many projects going at the same time...but loving it.  :)  It makes it all worthwhile to see a disheveled area become neat, to figure out the best way to use a space and fill it accordingly, to bring order out of chaos and beauty out of ugliness.

And so I continue to putter around my house, enjoying to the full this new day, this new month, this new header on the blog :), these new spaces that I've organized, this process of making my family's nest a little cleaner, a little neater, a little better to live in.  It's a wonderful day!