Organization

Something happened when I was pregnant with the boys.  I have felt, for a long time, that any inclination you have to be a certain way gets amplified as a result of pregnancy.  Your brain becomes altered when it deals with all those pregnancy hormones.  If you had a tendency to be a procrastinator and a little on the lazy side, then look out because nothing is going to get done once you've had a baby.  For me, I had a desire for things to be organized, but I wasn't quite so dead set on this.  After having the boys, my Type-A side became exaggerated, and now I just can't switch it off.  Do I live in a completely organized house.. well, No.  And doesn't that make my brain go crazy!!!  So from my long hours during the day and sleepless nights, I've determined a little something about organization.  It is the key to running a well oiled machine (or household).  And once you determine a way to organize something that works for you, then you will never be disorganized in that realm ever again. 

I'll give some examples.  In my old house in Maine, we never had a good spot for the vacuum cleaner.  It used to drive me nuts.  No matter where we tried to stick it, it was always blocking something else, and the item being blocked always seemed to need to be used.  At our house in Washington, the vacuum cleaner has its own spot in the hall closet, and I find I vacuum more because I'm not so angry every time I have to put it away.  The daily influx of mail used to leave us with huge piles of papers that needed to be dealt with at a later time.  But all those papers floating around, meant that we were sure to forget to deal with them until the opportunity had passed, and thus they would just be thrown away.  Now, I only check the mailbox when I know I will have 5 minutes to go through the mail and sort for trash, recycling, shredding or saving.  Voila!  No more counters covered in paperwork.  Naturally, my 5-year-old just started school so we now add a new piece to the puzzle with that volume of incoming paperwork, but it shouldn't be hard to adjust my organization system.

So whatever your organization dilemma, all you really need to do is keeping trying different systems until you find the one that works for you.  Our most recent dilemma was the piles of clothes the boys would have in their poorly organized closets and dressers.  So we went and bought them some bins and shelving from IKEA this past weekend.  Now my 5-year-old won't have to pull out all his clothes just to get to one item, and I can trust my 3-year-old (pictured) to pull his clothes out himself without the danger of his huge old dresser falling on him.  Naturally he got to help with putting it together which also made him extra proud this morning when he went to this item he had built to pull out his garments.