Embrace The Glorious Mess That You Are


"Embrace the glorious mess that you are." This is a magnet on my fridge. I got this to remind myself to embrace my messy house, embrace my messy life, embrace my craziness and not be ashamed of who I am and who I'm striving to be. My house is frequently considered a disaster zone. I have struggled with balancing a clean house, being a good mom, and keeping my sanity for years. It really is a delicate balance. I have found that I can be a really good house keeper OR I can be a really good mom. I'm not to the point where I can claim both of these things at the same time. Maybe someday?

The pile.

Everything in 1 pile on 1 side of the room.


I'm a bit OCD...you'd think that this would mean that I need things super clean. Here's my problem though. If something needs to be clean, then I'm going to clean that thing till it basically looks brand new, even if that means cleaning 1 thing for 8 hours. In the meantime everything else in the house is going to crap. But when I'm done....that 1 thing I cleaned is going to be amazing! Problem is that I don't get much cleaned up when I'm spending hours upon hours cleaning 1 thing at a time! Over the years of being a mom, I have had to fight this internally. Kind of like cleaning with 1 eye open and 1 eye closed. I usually have to give myself a pep talk, "Jean, this is good enough..." It's gotten better as the years have passed but it really is a struggle!

Sorting piles


Anything that disrupts our normal life or schedule also takes it's toll on the state of my house. Having a baby, everyone getting sick, & soccer season are all things that create craziness. Sometimes we're just hit and miss on getting chores done when life if crazy. Other times I have different levels of what I call "survival mode" in our family. Usual survival mode is when not much is getting done except what needs to get done like dishes, garbage, laundry, and homework. Other times survival mode is more like, just keep everyone alive, bare minimum of dishes are getting cleaned, and only if we run out of clean laundry is anything getting done. Luckily this level of survival mode is only in extreme circumstances!




In January we were coming out of a "survival mode" time frame from all of the holidays, the flu, plus adjusting to life with our 7th baby. Our house was a disaster! I decided to focus on 1 room at a time and deep clean everything. It worked out really well. We got through the whole house except 1 room that I never finished. We've kept things up fairly well. Good enough for a family of 9 and for my expectations. We do have to live here after all! Living can be messy!

Lots of tears going through toys to get rid of.


The pictures I'm sharing are from our basement, the playroom. When we moved we packed up the toys super fast. We did not have time to go through them all. I was not thrilled about that! I only had the kids unpack some toys. Of course that didn't work though because they snuck into all the other boxes and kept pulling things out. When it was the playroom's turn to be deep cleaned, we had so much crap to go through. Greg took all the leftover boxes and literally dumped them. Then we pushed all the toys into 1 giant pile. From there we sorted all the toys into piles. It was a big project to say the least.





After our January deep clean I re-did the way my kids hold themselves accountable for chores. I remade their daily checklist and I'm loving the way this has turned out. They have all the same chores they had before. But instead of telling me when each thing is done and moving on, I have them do the entire list before bringing it to me to be double checked. They can't play until they are done. They get a smiley face on the back of their list for completing it in a reasonably good mood. I do something just like this in the summer time but just a bit different.


I've come to the conclusion in my life that teaching kids to clean up and be responsible is hard. Being a mom and having a clean house is really hard and at times impossible. We should try as best as we can. But don't drive ourselves crazy trying to have the perfect house. Life has it's time and seasons for everything and this is my season for smudges on walls and toys all over. No avoiding it. So for now, I'm going to embrace the glorious mess that I am and that's ok.



Mostly done. Just have to take the boxes out to the car to donate.

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