The summer of 2015, I bought and read Marie Kondo’s The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up: The Japanese Art of Decluttering and Organizing, along with everyone else on the internet.
I have lost count of the number of garbage bags of stuff that went out the door as a result of reading it, but I would guess not less than twenty. I have never thought of myself as too sentimental about stuff. Yet I was storing craft supplies that I “might need” someday, excessive amounts of hand-me-downs for the kids, and a number of items in my own closet I was holding on to for the wrong reasons.
I hate feeling tied down. I thought about what would happen if we ever moved. I wouldn’t have time to deal with all our stuff. I’d end up throwing it in boxes and bringing it along even though it wasn’t worth keeping. Keeping the toys picked up had become onerous. My kids’ drawers were overflowing. My kids weren’t capable of keeping up with their own stuff themselves, and I couldn’t live with the disorder.
(Dead Horse Point State Park. We stopped there after going to Arches National Park in Moab, Utah on Road Trip 2016. If you are planning a road trip and Utah is on it, stop here. It was breathtaking.)
Recently at the library, I walked up to the counter surrounded by the kids, each holding their own pile of books. The librarian greeted us, and without saying anything else, turned around and pulled my inter-library loan books off of the shelf behind the front desk.
I hadn’t given him my card, he just knows who I am.
It felt really good to be known.
I just quit Facebook a month ago. Most of my closest friends live far away. My local ones friends I see sporadically at best, almost always with kids in tow. Life feels really lonely.
Number Three turned nine this day (although I confess I set a high bar by publishing the three year old’s photos on his birthday and will be back dating this one).
She is kind, tender, helpful, loving, and hard working. She is a star dancer. She loves to read.
When my house is trashed, my anxiety goes through the roof and I can’t think straight.
Last January, my husband was just starting a demanding and stressful job, which came with a pay raise. One of the ways we hoped to offset his increased hours and responsibilities was to hire a housekeeper.
My increasing inability to keep the house up to my standards coincided with a sharp decrease in help from my big kids. I was pregnant with our seventh baby, and I lacked the energy to enforce the chore list. It was so frustrating. Recently, I said, “I don’t have enough people to help me!” and my six year old sagely observed, “Oh, you have enough people. Them just not helpin.’ “
“Instead of wondering when your next vacation is, maybe you should set up a life you don’t need to escape from.” – Seth Godin
Nearly every afternoon I’m sitting on the sofa, recovering from the morning, while my kids have quiet time. Whenever we are at home, we have almost two hours where they do quiet activities in their rooms while I rest downstairs.
My big girls have taken to planning and implementing a curriculum for the littles during this time: they read poetry, art books, and stories, and the littles complete worksheets the girls have made for them with questions like, “What type of bird is this?” next to a drawing of a bird, or “What color comes after orange?” with a rainbow drawn next to it.
Sometimes quiet time is quiet, and other times I spend too much of it going up and down the stairs asking someone to stop screaming, or stop kicking the wall, or stop jumping off the furniture. Sometimes I’m so tired and it’s so quiet, I manage to fall asleep.
The golden hour of afternoon sunlight coincides with quiet time at this time of year. We often don’t start until close to two, and so the time stretches toward four, and the sunlight passes by the windows and makes everything glow.
