Maybe it’s sinking in after all!

For as long as I can remember now, I have been trying to control the chaotic mess that overruns our home. Pre-kids I was never a crazy neat freak, but my husband was and I did a pretty good job of keeping our home clean and tidy. I even have pictures to prove it. We had space and everything was nice. In our clothes closets and drawers things were sometimes pretty cluttered but at least on the surface we could have someone drop by unexpectedly and I didn’t want to curl up and die of embarrassment.

Then we had kids.

Holy cow, our place gets crazy now. I’ve done baskets and bins and boxes and I’ve also stuffed toys into garbage bags and hidden them in cupboards. Nothing seems to work. The worst part is that trying to get Hayley, my four-year-old to help me was harder than it was to put a man on the moon.

The past few days though have shown a bit of a change. She won’t clean up on her own, but today I asked her to clean up the mess of papers she had made in the living room while I made lunch. Much to my shock, when I came back to check, all but one paper were put away and she had even picked up some of the toys – even the ones she hadn’t used! For her to pick up her 19-month-old sister Breanna’s toys is unheard of.

Tonight the clean living room again turned into an explosion of toys and I asked Hayley to help me put them away for bath time. She grumbled for a second but then she got down and helped me. We have a bunch of plastic baskets to store toys by group and she had taken all the plastic food and put them in several of my metal mixing bowls. She helped me to put them all back in the proper basket, and when I turned back around I saw the bowls had disappeared. I heard a clatter in the kitchen and when I went to investigate, I found Breanna putting the bowls back in their proper cupboard under the counter, even in the right order by size.

Granted, Breanna may have a touch of OCD, but still, I was impressed.

It was so nice tonight, after the kids had gone to bed, to come out and just sit down in my living room, rather than having to find myself cleaning up on my own.

I don’t know what’s changed, maybe it’s because I stopped just telling Hayley to “clean this mess up” and got more specific – “put these papers away; put this stuff back in the orange basket.” I just hope whatever it was keeps working!

Maybe I should do a test run on the nuclear disaster of Hayley’s bedroom!