Me and my messy houses

Posted in Mom Stuff
by Lorain County Moms

This morning I woke up, looked around, and went back to bed.

My life has officially spung out of control. Every single room in the house is a mess.

It started 16 years ago when the first child was born. I was much more organized back then. Each night, I picked up the toys, kept on top of the laundry and took leisurely strolls around the neighborhood with the baby. The hubby took care of the lawn and painted the trim on the house. Life was bliss.

Baby number two came into the picture two years later. We had sold our little ranch and purchased a ranch with a basement. Life settled into a routine with a toddler and a baby. The toys were still picked up at night and I even organized them into the bins and toy box. Life was blissful as the hubby laid down sod in our new backyard and I planted flowers in pots.

Twenty three months later, my youngest child was born at home. I had a 4-year-old, a 2-year-old and a new baby. The hubby cleaned up the toys at night and the oldest kiddo helped by putting them away in the toy box. There were some days and nights that we simply collapsed exhausted on the couch with the toys strewn about us. Life was blissfully chaotic.

A few months later, my 14-year-old niece came to live with us so she could go to a new high school. Life became a blur of screaming children and a teenager who needed to be dropped off here and there. I still managed to cook on most nights and clean up here and there. I was teaching part-time at a community college and started running a non-profit organization. Life started to unravel at home. The teenager had a room that looked like a tornado ran through it. The rest of the house started to look the same.

So what did we do?

We moved.

“A bigger house will help,” I told my husband. “We’ll have a place for everything, and we’ll put everything in its place.”

So we moved into a five-bedroom house just a few blocks away. The first few years weren’t too bad. We just shoved Rubbermaid boxes into the crawl space, figuring we’d unpack them little by little. The kids started growing up and accumulating stuff of their own. I started a habit of saving every little thing they wrote, every little project they brought home from school. I had a drawer full of pictures that I planned to scrapbook for them, except I couldn’t find the scrapbooks — they were packed away somewhere in the crawlspace. So I bought new ones that sat in a drawer for a few years until the middle kid discovered them and started scrapbooking. Now my daughter has the half-unfinished scrapbooks lying at the bottom of her closet.

The jobs came along, the kids grew older, and the house suffered.

So now here I am, several years later, with two teenagers and a tween and a house full of … stuff. Stuff everywhere. How did I go from the organized Mom to the gal who could be related to Pigpen? I don’t know. All I know is that I woke up this morning and wanted to crawl right back into bed.

So I did.

—By Karen Putz,  CHICAGO MOMS BLOG

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This is an original post from the Chicago Moms Blog (http://www.chicagomomsblog.com). When Karen isn’t avoiding cleaning her house, she can be found blogging at A Deaf Mom Shares Her World (http://www.deafmomworld.com/) and Disaboom (http://www.disaboom.com/).