This past weekend at work, I spoke with a disarmingly friendly and open coworker who shared her tradition for New Year’s with me. Every year, she cleans her house from top to bottom, down to bathing her kids, and her family shares a meal together. There may also have been other family activities, but what really stuck with me was the cleaning.

Each year, starting out with a clean house, and clean kids.

From what she said, it sounds like she has a 2-bedroom situation, while my house is two stories and five bedrooms. She has two kids, while I have seven, 4 of whom need help to bathe.

For me, starting the New Year off with a clean slate is not a one-day enterprise. But I loved what she said about giving herself and her family a fresh start each year, and I started thinking about what I could do to make some version of it happen at our house.

Over New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Day, I got the kids involved and we cleaned most of the house. There are a couple of rooms that need to be mopped, and one room I didn’t get to at all, but between all of us (the Chaplain chipped in, too), the house is cleaner than it’s been in a long time.

We threw out holey socks and broken toys, and gathered up stained or ripped clothing. I helped the kids clean behind and under things in their rooms. We tackled the pernicious pile at the top of the stairs, and the pile at the bottom, too. Only one of those piles survived, and it’s a shadow of what it once was. We found some interesting stuff. And a lot of baby socks.

The room I didn’t get to can maybe be a project for the rest of this week. Our dining room is not only where we eat, but a resting place for laundry baskets, mending, and broken things. It will take some work to clear out all the piles, and the crumbs are hard to get rid of completely.

Only three of my kids got bathed, but I’ll get to the others eventually.

This week I re-read my post from last New Year’s. Our family had just gone through some major upheaval and I was feeling like I needed a fresh start, but wasn’t sure if that was what I was going to get from the new year.

The year that followed blows my mind, and I am fully aware of the irony of that phrase. But in some ways, we are right where we were last year, a little tender, and still trying to find our way forward.

I’m not one for resolutions, but I’m curious and hopeful to see what this year will bring.

Do you make goals for the new year? Do you tell anyone about them? Is there another time of the year when you take inventory?

I hope you’ll read and live along with me in the coming months to see what comes next. Hopefully, you’ll discover something new in the process, whether it’s an idea or a book, or something else neither of us knew was coming.

When I wrote last year’s post, we were in Tobago. This year, looking in on a cozy Christmas scene is more what it felt like. I didn’t make taking down all my decorations part of my whole-house clean – it’ll happen bit by bit over the next few weeks. We did find some time today to sit in our cozy Christmas scene and watch a matinee movie – the adaptation for the book I just read. It was fascinating to add visuals – some of the scenes felt a little disappointing compared to what I imagined (the bachelorette party) while others (the roof-top restaurant) exceeded my imagination. It’s always fun to watch a movie while the details of the book are still fresh.