Today’s Task

Keeping up with housework is hard when you have children, especially when your children are young. Little Guy and Z-Man sometimes go into Tornado Mode – whirling through the house at breakneck speed, leaving a trail of destruction behind them. When you add in the extra work, mess and lack of time the childcare brings to the mix it’s no wonder our house is always in some state of messiness. By the time I get one room picked up the children have attacked another room and brought it to ruin.

I’ve pretty much accepted the fact that we’ll never live in a June Cleaver home, but that doesn’t mean I’ve totally given up. Every morning in addition to my daily cleaning/dishes routine I try to do one extra task to work towards Cleaver Nirvana.

Today’s task was to clean out the kitchen utensil/junk drawer. This is the drawer where things that we need but don’t use very often get tossed; like the food chopper, chop sticks, straws, plastic “silverware”, etc. Since the baby lock broke it’s been one of Little Guy’s favorite places to dig for treasure. He can often be found sitting IN the drawer, happily choosing an item, examining it – including the all-important taste test, then tossing it onto the floor next to the drawer. Of course he’s not the only reason the drawer is a mess, the older kids aren’t too careful when they put things away; I think their favorite method is open-drop-slam.

I don’t mind organizing, I actually like it. I find it therapeutic to throw away things we won’t use, sort like things into groups and put each group away neatly. I know, I probably have issues. Today I started by dumping everything out of the drawer onto the floor. Not only did it give me a clean slate to start with, it was fun!

After wiping out the drawer and finding crisp new shoe boxes to replace old squished ones I got to work sorting, grouping and throwing away. It didn’t take long before I was putting the last articles in the drawer and admiring my work. Doesn’t that look tons better? Maybe it’s still not worthy of Cleaverdom, but I’m happy with it.

Now I just need to replace that darn lock to keep Little Guy out of the drawer and teach the big kids how to put things away properly… that could take a while!