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I proudly present to you our newst member of the family. Born May 10 after 41 weeks of hard labour

Princess Kissy-face (formerly Princess Kicky-poo):

In an effort to keep up with the rapidly expanding project I like to call “Trying to Clean the House” I have instituted the 3 tasks rule.

It goes like this:

Every day while Brian is at work I continue to slog through the clutter and clean up. While doing so I come up with three jobs for Brian to do when he gets home. Once home he does his regular chores (feed cat, make dinner, clean cat box) and the three extra tasks I have listed for him. These usually include things like “What the hell are you going to do with the old printer? Get rid of it” or “Could you please move all this extra wood molding to the wood shop?” Things he is happy to do. After his three tasks are done he is free to do what he will with his time and I don’t try to con him into cleaning more stuff around the house (the guy works hard enough as is…)

So yesterday I got to cleaning up what is supposed to be our room. I say “supposed to be” because it looked more as though we had a prolapsed closet with a bed attached. I tidied up as much as my poor nerves could handle but when it comes to Brian’s closet I draw the line. He has so many rules about how to separate his t-shirts (printed ones go here, plain ones go there) undywares, socks (which drawer again?) and pants (no real place to put these) that I can never keep up with what is going on.

I bravely decided that instead of three small tasks Brian would have the one onerous task of putting his clothes away.

This did not please him at all. In fact, he pouted.

For 20 minutes.

Until I patted him on the side of the head and said “poor little bunny” three or four times.
At that point he sighed and agreed to do it.

After dinner, bath time, story time, bedtime and farting around on his computer for a while he finally trudged off to the bedroom to put away his clothes. May I please point out that his clothes were not dirty. Nope. His job was to put away his clean and neatly folded laundry.

After five minutes he came out o the room, went to his computer and started tapping away. I didn’t say anything. He eventually went back to picking up his clothes.

Five minutes after returning to work on his clothes he again went to the computer. This happened three or four times. The last time he broke to check out his computer I decided to ask him just why the hell he needed Wikipedia in order to put his socks and underwear away.

That didn’t so much happen though because he didn’t actually go to his computer that time. Instead he came back through the living room with the hammer in his hand.

“Why the hell do you need a hammer to put your clothes away Brian?!?”

He wiggled his eyebrows at me and shot back

“To make everything fit.”

Several minutes of hammering later he emerged from the bedroom and sat down. He didn’t tell me just what in the world he did with the hammer but all his clothes were put away so I decided not to ask.

With the newest member of the family comes a host of logistical issues that, until now, I have refused to acknowledge. I realize this is stupid but at the same time, there was plenty to be worried about and I didn’t want to focus too closely on all the crap in the house for fear of having a clutter-induced nervous breakdown. But now, a month into my maternity leave, I have decided to occupy my non-baby hours (or rather minutes) with the enormous problem of space. namely:

Where the hell do we put everything?

TO be honest, I am not a pack rat. I love to move stuff along to it’s next owners. When the Goodwill opened up a training branch within a 2 minute drive from my house it felt as if the universe itself had looked down upon me and said

“Here, I thought you could use this. Enjoy.”

Sweet fanciful Moses do I love the Goodwill. You know what’s even better? Turbo tax now has an on-line program for “It’s deductible” which allows you to keep a running tally of all the crap you donate to the Goodwill. It makes that tiny little penny pinching piece of my heart sing Hosannas.

So far I’ve been to the Goodwill every week for the past 6 weeks. This is because we have been steadily moving through all the baby clothes, maternity clothes, random crap my husband has saved from his childhood and the storage downstairs to cull out the unwanted and unnecessary. About two weeks into this project I wondered aloud just what the hell is our problem? WHY oh WHY do we have so much stuff when other, seemingly normal people don’t seem to have this problem. To which my husband replied:

“Those people rent storage space. We’re too cheap.”

Ahhh, good point. I am cheap. But I’d like to think I’m cheap in a good way. I mean, I don’t make my kids wear crappy shoes while I strut around in $500 salon kicks. No, we all wear crappy shoes together.

No wait, that’s not true. We all have one pair of really nice shoes which we wear every day. In some cases we’ve worn them every day for three years. However, since this embarrasses my sister to no end, I am considering buying a new pair of shoes for summer. I haven’t decided what color yet though.

But that’s enough about shoes. The real problem we face is sleeping arrangements. You see, our house (I love my house) is laid out so that there are two bedrooms on the main floor, one bedroom downstairs and one huge playroom/rec-room/what have you room for the top floor. And, as I’m sure many of you know from personal experience, ALL of those rooms are filled with stuff that should really be organized and probably in a different room. If we only had more shelves.

And, as those of you with young children may know, no matter how many bedrooms we have – we could have fourteen – by 4 am every morning all of the family is lumped into one bed…

Ours.

This includes the baby, our 3 year old son, me, my husband and 25 pounds of cat (not all on the same cat – one of them only weighs 7 pounds) Understandably I sometimes wake up to find my poor husband has decamped and is snoring away on the floor in the next room. The Other bedroom.

The ownership of this bedroom is soon to be a hot button issue in our house. My ultimate goal is to move our son upstairs to the enormous, toy-infested play room. As you may have guessed, the problems with this plan are legion. the main one being that Catfish has no desire to surrender such valuable real estate to a little baby – no matter how much he may profess to love her.

The other problems involve stuff. Lots and lots of stuff. It accumulates in the corners when I’m not looking. This is due in part to the fact that whenever my husband’s parents visit they always always bring stuff with them. Be it a three foot tall paper mache skeleton or a 25 year old space costume pattern, they can be counted on to bring us something from their lives. Recently, we sent our son to spend the weekend. When we met up and had dinner on Sunday I was shocked to see that they had no extra gifts with them. That is until later when I opened his suitcase and found that they had packed a 30 year old knife block in with his clothes. I’m not sure why. I worry that they may be slowly trying to move into our house, one piece of kitchen gadgetry at a time. They’re wonderful people and I know they mean well but all the same, the room upstairs to nearing maximum capacity and it needs to be gone through before we can even think of moving the Catfish up there.

So this is the project I have set for myself. I intend to clean that room up to a point that our son could move up there. As an added challenge I would like to get it to a point that he would want to move up there without any cajoling from the parental sector.

Here is what I face:

The stair landing.

This is the first point at which stuff accumulates. It is never clear. Good luck trying to get upstairs.

The desk area.

If stuff is actually taken upstairs, it usually stop right here. Except in the case of the shelves. Notice how much the actual shelving space is NOT being used?

The main play floor.

Always always ALWAYS populated with some sort of track that is in need of fixing/putting together/parental help. As you can see here, someone seems to have discovered the joy of paper towels.

I hate this futon.

There’s really not much more to say about it.

The furniture graveyard.

These pieces are actually heirlooms. They are beautiful pieces. It’s such a shame we have so much crap that we have no space for them.

The Nook.

I thought at one time I could use this for my crafty-type area. But I was so wrong. I never come up here because I can’t get past the clutter.

Now that I’ve shown you what a complete terror my household can be please don’t hold this against me. Don’t think that I’m a slob or a pack rat or just plain lazy because I’m not. It’s just that the entropy in this household is a force to be reckoned with. It’s two against one in the de-cluttering department and there are too many areas for me to work on at once. That is why I’m going to break this down into little tiny projects and clean them one by one – I hope. And, if anybody comes along to mess them up after I’m done there may be a scene.

Wish me luck!

I’ll keep you posted.