Thirty-One Gifts

Did you know I'm a consultant with Thirty-One Gifts? I have been for almost a year now.

What is Thirty-One Gifts?

Thirty-One is a direct sales company offering a variety of products to help make your life easier. Whether you are looking for style, organization, the perfect giftable item - or a little bit of everything - we've got it. From totes or purses you can wear while you’re out and about, thermals to help you transport food and drinks to a party, or organizational items to help you keep your house neat and tidy, Thirty-One has a solution! All products are customizable - each item comes in a variety of prints (with prints changing two or three times a season) AND the majority of items we sell can be personalized with embroidery or laser etching.

The Retro Metro bag (print: Lotsa Dots). I actually USE this purse! (I've never been a 'purse' kind of girl so that's nothing short of a miracle.)

What is direct sales?

Direct sales companies include well known brands such as Avon, Tupperware, Pampered Chef, and more. Individuals sign up to become Independent Consultants with the company. Products are primarily sold through home parties, where you invite your friends over to shop from the comfort of your home, and you (the host or hostess) receive free and discounted items for hosting the show. Consultants run their own business, set their own hours, and determine their earning potential. It's a fun and rewarding business!

A few of our products that are perfect for bringing home groceries (one of their MANY uses). The Market Thermal Tote (upper left, print: Circle Spirals) and the Large Utility Tote (upper right, print: Pin Dots) are two products I use almost daily.

Why did you sign up with Thirty-One Gifts?

Honestly? I initially signed up to get a discount on the products. A friend threw a party in August 2011; I had never heard of Thirty-One Gifts, and my cursory glance at the catalog left me thinking it was one of those 'purse parties'. I'm not really a purse kind of girl so I was a bit reluctant about attending but I wanted to support my friend. Imagine my surprise when I showed up and learned that a) the majority of the products are NOT purses, b) I actually love most of the purses they DO have, and c) the products were cute, stylish, well made, and I was IN LOVE with them. It was only $100 to sign up as a consultant, I had people at the party telling me they'd host parties for me, and my wishlist would have cost me more than that anyway... so I signed up. I've been a very casual consultant over the past year, hosting a party maybe every other month - enough to keep me active and get my hands on my desired products. These are the bags I never knew I needed but suddenly can't live without. I take them EVERYWHERE and I love them.

Our new Making Memories Thermal (print: Mint Chip). Only available to hostesses! Both the front pocket and the large section are thermal, and it has an extendable handle and wheels. It folds down for easy storage when not in use. I just used mine last week at Cub Scout Camp - it kept our lunches and drinks cold ALL DAY outside in 90 degree heat. Amazing!

Moving forward, I'd like to share Thirty-One with more people and put more effort into the business side of things. I'll be sharing occasional monthly specials and favorite products in future posts.

If you have any questions, feel free to ask in the comments! If you live in my area (south suburbs of Chicago) and would like to host a party, let me know. If you would like to sign up for my newsletter, e-mail me here and I will add you to my mailing list.

I will soon have a personal Thirty-One Gifts website for online shopping and will share that here when I have it!

The Thirty-One Gifts story:

Gather Up Your Tears; Keep 'Em In Your Pocket. Save Them For A Time When You're Really Going To Need Them.

Today was a hard day, for a number of reasons. Health troubles, business troubles, life troubles, anxiety... overall just a downer. I'm medicating with music. A friend suggested wine, but wine (in addition to wreaking havoc on my already unstable blood sugar) has been bringing me migraines lately, and I just got rid of a near-24-hour one, so I don't feel like tempting that fate again.


Sometimes when I'm down I'll listen to energizing music to cheer me up... and then sometimes, it's really comforting to listen to beautiful, melancholy songs. That may seem odd, that indulging in sadness would be healing, and yet it is. It hearkens back to one of my favorite articles, "Why Lying Broken In A Pile On Your Floor Is A Good Idea".


"All the places where you’ve shattered can now reflect light and colour where there was none. Now is the time to become something new, to choose a new whole."


So I'm indulging in my sadness tonight; in the parts of me that are broken right now, because it's time to become something new. It's scary and it's hard but if I don't do it the crocodiles are going to eat me, so I'm rending myself into little pieces, to be unlimited.





This song is beautiful; it just breaks my heart every time I hear it. The melancholy and, at the same time, the wisdom it portrays fill me with both sadness and hope. I have a dear friend who died young some ten years ago and of course I think of her every time I hear it. But then I think of everyone I've lost, and everyone dear to me who has lost loved ones; for it seems as if 'young' is really relative, and it always seems like our loved ones are snatched away too soon. Gone and yet I believe they are still with us, in one way or another.
'Lord make me a rainbow, I'll shine down on my mother'
'the sharp knife of a short life'
'I've had just enough time'
'I'm as green as the ring on my little cold finger'
'what I never did is done'
'funny when you're dead, how people start listening'

 

 Pink Floyd has some amazing songs, especially when it comes to melancholy. This is one of my favorites; it captures the melancholy perfectly but also ends with hope, with a heartfelt beseechingness to act, to keep going, to feel.
'No more turning away
From the weak and the weary
No more turning away
From the coldness inside'

 

 I'm not necessarily searching for a spiritual answer right now, but I frequently feel lost and alone these days. I feel myself reaching out for someone, anyone, to show me the way; to give me the strength and the courage to believe that I'll get there someday. One step at a time. One meal at a time; one workout at a time; one blood test at a time. One day, one hour, one minute at a time.

 

Yes I *am* a huge nerd, why do you ask? I like Enya and I LOVE Lord Of The Rings. The movies are pretty much perfect. And if you're looking for a melancholy story of epic struggle, you certainly don't need to look any further. As a matter of fact I'm tempted to go and watch them right now but that'll be like 16 hours and I'll NEVER sleep.
'believe and you will find your way'

 

I'm going to end with one of the most heart-rending songs out there... and I'm choosing to listen to Susan Boyle's audition version because while the song is beautifully depressing, this version at least ends with a lovely lady seeing her dream fulfilled. Godspeed Susan, and Godspeed to me as well. May all our dreams have significantly better outcomes than poor Fantine's.

Re-Inventing Myself

I go for long periods of time not blogging these days. I'm struggling with my anxiety monsters a lot, and my diabetes is raging out of control. There are a lot of changes on the horizon for me and that's never easy. And as always, I struggle with a lot of the same issues every day. Major clutter. Weight issues. Trouble with food. Trouble with managing my life in general.


Sometimes I get so down in the dumps about it all that the only thing I think I can do is re-invent myself. I'll start a new blog somewhere, writing about my life! I'll get it all together THIS TIME, and I'll keep it anonymous until I have it all together, then I'll re-emerge like a glorious phoenix out of the ashes of my current miserable, decrepit existence!

This time the 'new' blog was going to be called "Small House, Big Life" and was going to be all about my BIG struggles and BIG dreams locked away in a tiny space, fighting to get free. That doesn't sound familiar at all, does it?? And I might have even started it too if someone hadn't already claimed the name on blogger.

As I was sitting there staring at my Google search results and thinking of similar alternate names for the 'new me', I realized that my OLD blog is still me too. That just because a bunch of people know about this blog, doesn't make me any less able to make the changes I want. It doesn't mean I will, and it doesn't mean I won't. That's up to me. It's NOT up to whether I blog about it or not. And if I blog about it and people read it and it takes a long time to happen, it doesn't make me a failure. As long as I persevere I will get there eventually.

Sometimes I just get so ashamed of everyone watching me go in circles again and again.

But like the old adage says, 'wherever you go, there you are'. Hiding in a different corner of the internet won't make me change any faster.

And as long as I keep trying and keep fighting, I shouldn't be ashamed.

Moving On

Christmas vacation is over! The kids are back in school today. I enjoyed having them home with me the last two weeks and I am kind of sad. Everyone's adjusting back to going to bed early and waking up early. Somewhat reluctantly, on all our parts, I might add.

Things are coming along in all the other areas of life. Financial Peace University starts tomorrow. I picked up our kit yesterday and I'm really looking forward to it. We have something of a working budget hammered out for now. We're so far behind on the house that for now we've decided we're not paying the mortgage. We are in communications with the mortgage company and have tried several angles to get assistance, to no avail. Right now what we will probably do is wait until they start foreclosure proceedings and then see if we can turn it into a short sale. That will, hopefully, buy us the time we'll need to get everything together to move somewhere else.

"Somewhere else" is looking like it'll probably be North Carolina. I'm open to it and OJ is really interested. We love Boone but employment opportunities are slim... so it'll probably be either Raleigh or Charlotte. He has friends in both cities, and I have a cousin in Raleigh.

On our radar is also Austin, Texas. We have friends there, and OJ's brother lives there. Neither of us have ever been though, and OJ is really not keen on how hot it gets (whereas I LOVE it!).

(And of course, lest we forget, we're probably going to spend about a year in Park City, Utah after I win my beloved HGTV Dream Home.)

It is our hope to visit all of the places on our list sometime this year so we can truly decide on our favorite and start looking for work. And of course, despite which one ends up being the 'favorite', it'll really depend on jobs. OJ's going to try to get a job and stay with friends while he finds us a place to live, I think. We'll just have to see how it all plays out.

I'm still working on the house. Getting lots of stuff purged. Which reminds me, I have a trunk full of stuff I need to bring to Kara, the lady that sells my stuff on ebay. She does an awesome job! She has an ebay store and does online consignment for several people, so she always has a nice variety of merchandise. If anyone is in need of stuff, and wants to help out me, or her, or any of the rest of us local moms that need money, you can find her store here: The Sweet Buy And Buy.

I've also started working on my health a bit more. I had stopped taking everything but the absolute necessary medications while I was having all my stomach trouble last year, and while that hasn't completely cleared up (the endoscopy showed nothing but some inflammation, biopsies of which gave us no information), we're chalking it up to stress/anxiety pain and acid reflux. So I'm easing my way back into my other medicines and vitamins, starting with my metformin, which is causing a little bit of stomach upset but is also bringing my blood sugar down to more acceptable levels, so yay. I'll do most of my health and weight loss blogging over at my blog, The Big Fat Breakup, if anyone wants to follow along.

one of my favorite recent pins. Are you on Pinterest yet? Follow me!

IUD-Day

Had my IUD removed yesterday. My five years were up and it was time. You all know I've been wanting another baby anyway... I'm still in the "yay babies!" boat. OJ is in the "baby in a year or two" boat. I'm putting him in charge of birth control for now.

Is this an ideal time to have a baby? HELL NO. Are there things I want to do to improve our lives before we have a baby? ABSOLUTELY. All the same, would I be thrilled if I got pregnant? You know it!
Life's funny that way. Things tend to work themselves out as they should.

We're working on our finances. Financial Peace University starts next week. We have hard decisions and even harder work ahead of us.

I'm continuing to get the house in order. Purging even more than before since it looks like we'll be moving in the next 6 months - 1.5 years. However we decide is best to approach the house issue, we're going to try to stay here as long as we can to get into the best financial position possible for moving somewhere. Right now we're leaning towards waiting until foreclosure starts and then seeing if we can get into a short sale. We need more information overall though before we really decide.

My health needs work. I need to eat better foods, have lower blood sugar, and exercise more. I should also work on some meditation / stress relief exercises to help with the anxiety. If I get pregnant I won't be able to take my anxiety medications so that's something I'll really need to work on.

Those three things remain my biggest priorities right now.

Financial Peace

I've always been a fan of Dave Ramsey, but I've never really put effort into following his ideas... or much of any ideas about finances, really. I'd dabble in fixing our finances but never really committed for more than a short while. Good intentions, bad follow-through. After reading about a friend's experience with Dave's Financial Peace University (and her recent encouragement to check out one of the local FPU classes that will be starting soon), I convinced OJ that we should take the class. It's $100, not very much to spend on one's financial future. I think taking it together, spending dedicated time for 12 weeks talking about our finances and ways to make things better, working together and finally building a solid partnered financial foundation in our marriage, is a good idea.

OJ is skeptical about the fact that it is a Christian-based program and that it is held at a church. He's become very atheist over the past year or two. I told him there was no way I was entertaining the idea of moving to the Bible Belt (North Carolina) with him if he wouldn't even take a class because it was held at a church. I'm sure we can filter out any God messages and apply them in our own spiritual / ethical / moral way. He also doesn't love the idea of paying someone (AKA making THEM rich) to give us 'financial peace', but I maintain that people's time and efforts are worth paying for if we learn something / get value from it. AND, as I said, $100 is not that much for two people to invest in a 12-week class.

I don't know which class we will be taking yet; I have sent an email to the most likely one with some questions. Hopefully we'll be able to start soon.

I wonder if there's a way to take these methods and convert them in such a way that they could be applicable to weight loss and clutter management. I could become the next guru of fixing up your life!

I Am A Recovering Hoarder

This is the area I've recently spent the most time on in my home. I've been, quite frankly, dreading showing these pictures to the world at large. It's no secret to my family and friends, and while everyone chides me from time to time about being messy (except for my brethren-in-chaos, who sympathize with my plight), it's just sort of an accepted fact.

When I'm showing the world at large though, or even when I'm sitting privately in a room talking to my new therapist about some of the possible OCD tendencies I have, and I'm trying to describe my problems and really face up to them so I can fix them and move past, it sort of stares me right in the face: I have hoarding tendencies. I may, in fact, be a hoarder.

I might be something of a hoarder in recovery, because getting rid of most things has become much, MUCH easier for me over the years, BUT it's an overwhelming task to accomplish on my own. It's an overwhelming task to accomplish while struggling to learn how to organize things that I keep, balance housework, tending to a family, working (in whatever form it may appear in my life; nowadays that's primarily writing), having hobbies, having a social life, and just generally feeling overwhelmed and anxious almost all of the time. I'm trying to take it day by day and do my best.

I was, am, horribly embarrassed to share the before pictures with the world. This was my dining room. This is the room people see when they come to my house. This is what greeted anyone that happened to look through my GIANT GLASS FRONT DOOR. This is one of the rooms we tended to use the most. How did we ever function around all of this?

This isn't even the worst of it. That's the part that really embarrasses me. Just one room, eh, everyone's life can get a little out of control from time to time. But this was our most LIVABLE room. So, yes, there's more to come.

But for now, I will revel in the accomplishment I have achieved over the past week, and enjoy my peaceful, organized, clean dining room.

This is directly across from the front door; that's our dining room table, piled high with god-knows-what. We generally just ate all our meals on my bed, in front of the TV.


Now, a peaceful oasis! The file cabinet will not be living there permanently; I just happened to acquire it from a friend moments before these pictures were taken. Its new home isn't quite ready for it yet. Also, I need to pretty it up a little bit.


I couldn't get the exact angle at my computer desk corner because there was too much stuff in the way.


Now, it's like my own little office in the corner! All of the boxes / bags to the right are where the file cabinet is living now; they were full of paper. Now the file cabinet is full of paper! It still needs to be sorted through and organized but I kind of need more therapy for that. I have a real big problem with paper.


Facing the front door. I didn't take a before shot UP the wall because there was no real reason to; the focus was the floor. All that laundry! You might think I sorted it all out there to make it look worse, but in actuality I had sorted it out there a week or so prior, and the dogs went tearing through and mixed it all up, and feeling defeated, I just... left it there. For a week or so.


But it's gone now! Sorted in the basement and DONE, even. In its place is that great entryway organizer from IKEA. We'll be bringing it a little lower on the wall; it's a bit awkward in its current placement. Eventually the cedar chest will be going where the kids' desk is, but that won't be until we finish the basement, allowing us to move down there and give the kids their own bedrooms (they currently share one now).


More of Mount Laundry. All of those boxes, they're mostly empty in that picture; they were full of things I had packed when I thought my husband and I were getting divorced and I was going to move out (that kind of throws a big wrench into life plans and 'getting things done' too, let me tell you). They ended up turning into 'purging and garage sale' boxes. The cedar chest, which you can barely see there, is where it actually BELONGS, but we moved it to the other wall temporarily to make space for the kids' desk.


The currently-finished area with the kids' desk and art supply box. Yes, it's the first thing you see when you walk in the door, but it's a heck of a lot better than Laundry Hill and Box Mountain! It will eventually live in one of the kids' rooms, once we're able to GIVE them separate bedrooms, but for now I can live with this arrangement.


It can be really hard to get a feel for a room based on pictures. What I love most about this current arrangement is that it feels like the room is divided into sections. We have a small two-bedroom ranch house with four people, two dogs and a cat; we really need every room to be efficient and, often, multipurpose. This way, it feels like the room has a separate entryway, a dining area, and a small office / social area. (My desk cabinet can easily be closed to look like a nice piece of furniture, and the chair turned to make this area a small seating nook when friends visit.) It's clean, it's attractive, it's welcoming and it's PEACEFUL.

It gives me hope for the rest of my house.

living in a VAN down by the RIVER

I would consider today a moderate success.

Yesterday, after meeting with my therapist, I spent most of the afternoon / evening being thoroughly unproductive, feeling anxious about everything we had talked about and trying to figure out how I was going to get everything done when I was only allowed to focus on ONE thing on my list (of probably 12 different things, easy). I let the worry gnaw at me and wash over me and tried to figure out how I might be able to 'cheat' and justify it.

In the end, the product of all that worrying (and talking to my husband and a good friend about my options) lead me to the conclusion that focusing on the house was the best thing for this week. I still feel a little bit like the world might explode if I don't focus on the other things, and I have no idea what's going to happen financially, but if I can actually make this happen and get the house in order for once and for all, I might have a chance at being more productive and getting things done and making money and saving us from financial ruin. Of course I've said this before, and of course I'll spend plenty of time second guessing myself and trying to slowly work all those other things back into my life. But for now, it's just one week. One week and I can go and talk to my therapist and if I'm ready to freak out about not doing other things yet, hopefully she'll be able to help me.

My morning routine:

I got it all done. It took a while, and I hit some stumbling blocks, things I find particularly distasteful, I delayed, I experienced anxiety, but I got through it. I wrote in my personal journal a lot today, trying to make note of all the things that were particularly rough for me, times I felt anxious about things, times I was resistant to doing things. I'm still very time-focused and it all took me longer than I think it 'should'. But it got done.

My One Task:

I don't have a good name for this task, but it involves cleaning up, decluttering, and organizing my house, and boxing up things to sell / get rid of. Making The House A Home And Maybe Making A Little Money In The Process? Yeah, it's a pretty clunky title, I know. I finished three rooms today - our bedroom (which I'd worked on some a day or two previous and was already well on its way), our upstairs hallway and the upstairs bathroom.
Once I got in the groove, I was pretty happy to be working on this stuff today. Of course, I didn't get to any of the really horrible rooms yet, and I will admit that once I finished the bedroom, the temptation to stay in my clean, peaceful bedroom and pretend the rest of my house didn't exist was pretty strong.
Halfway through the day I caught myself trying to focus on the TIME it would take to complete the whole house decluttering process and setting goals for myself again. Setting goals in and of itself isn't a bad thing, it's obviously something I believe in and do with regularity; the problem is that I tend to set pretty lofty, unattainable goals. Or rather, the goals aren't unattainable, but the time I give myself to complete them is. I'm never content to just trust the process and believe it will happen if I keep working. it always has to be done by a certain TIME, and when I catch myself falling off my self-imposed timeline I get frustrated, I feel defeated, and I often give up. So I made note of that in my personal journal and will take that to the therapist next week. It's one of those things about myself where I just can't really fathom HOW it could be any different. But maybe it should be, and maybe it could be.

Here's some pictures of the progress in my house (taken with my phone, so I apologize in advance for the quality)!

Our Bedroom ( I have no befores, only afters):

from the doorway

our view from the bed. the computer has since been moved to the center bookshelf.

my bedside table, and Feona

The upstairs hallway:

before

after

before 2

after 2 (dog butts!)

The upstairs bathroom:

before

after (reorganized baskets)

before 2 (yes the dogs follow me everywhere)

after 2

I do not know how to fix ANY of this picture formatting. This was a very frustrating post, in terms of pictures. A blogging design genius I am NOT.




Unemployment:

I don't know what's happening. I got my full unemployment check this week. By my calculations, I either have one week left, or two weeks left. I'm not sure. I understand that a new extended benefits bill was just signed in but I do not understand how that affects me. Illinois Unemployment hasn't updated their website with new information pertaining to it, and often they seem to leave these things vague anyway. So I don't know if we're running out of money soon or getting a temporary reprieve. I intend to act as if we are running out of money soon and that I need to find a way to come up with that $1650 difference each month as long as I am out of work (and that if I find a job, the take-home has to cover at LEAST that much PLUS full time childcare). However, I am trying not to think about any of this until my next therapy session because it just leads to panic and will render ineffective anything my therapist is trying to accomplish with me. I know my family and friends will never let us starve or go homeless, and I guess that's what I should focus on, that even if we are destitute and lose everything, we will still have a roof over our heads and food in our bellies. That is a far cry from what I WANT, and I will certainly do everything in my power to keep it from happening, but it's better than living in a van down by the river.

living simply.

"Really and truly live more simply, at least for now; go through things and SELL THEM OFF, make it hurt, make a real concerted effort to pay off debt and get in a better position. don't incur debt like this again. make lists of things you'd like to purchase WHEN YOU ARE OUT OF DEBT AND HAVE THE MONEY. Prioritize it. You can always get the 'stuff' later. And 'stuff' is just for fun, it's not that important anyway."

That's a goal that I just added to my Million Dreams list. For a number of reasons, living more simply is heavy on my mind right now. There are a number of things falling apart all around me and this is one way I feel that I can take control. It's something I can take control of that will, I believe, HELP me in the long run, help make at least some things better. I would like to start going through the things I have and selling them, many of them. A step outside the normal decluttering I've been working on. A step where it will sting a little to get rid of some of these things. I will not get rid of items that are truly meaningful to me, of course. I'd like to:
*make a list of things I am willing to spend a little extra money on (such as weekly Global dinners with friends, or family reunion vacation this summer)
*work over my budget and pare out anything that isn't absolutely important to me
*impose a moratorium on buying anything frivolous until we are out of non-mortgage debt
* start a list of things we would like to purchase once we have achieved the debt-free goal; keep it prioritized and not purchase any of those things until we've not only achieved our goal but also saved the money to purchase them with cash
* try to get as many of the things we want as we can for free - through freecycle or borrowing or bartering, for instance
* if something comes up that we decide is worth the money to do and we can't make it be free, evaluate it ahead of time and try to make it as cheap as possible. bring sack lunches, for instance; carpool; order cheap food; drink water, not booze; that sort of thing.
* put every extra cent we have into debt payment and just FUCKING GET RID OF IT

That's kind of what I'd like to do right now.

It's a necessary step, getting rid of debt; it's something I want to do anyway, I've talked about it here before. But this isn't about getting rid of debt so much as it is getting rid of baggage right now. I just need a fresh start. I need to look at things with fresh eyes. I need to cut some ridiculously loose ends. No matter what direction my life takes from this moment forward, I don't think doing this will hurt; I think it will only help.

So I think I might actually DO this. This time. (Yeah, I've talked about things like this before, but never done it. Maybe this is my time.)

Working Hard For The Money

It is true that I didn't hit my self-imposed cleaning goals for January. However, I came very close. I built in cleaning AND decluttering time into my February work schedule, and moved ahead into following this new schedule when the month started. So far, a week into February, it seems to be working pretty well. There have been some challenges, and there will be some tweaking as time goes on (indeed, there already has been some tweaking)... but for the most part I think that what I came up with is pretty sound. I will have to see, as the month goes on, how much I have gotten accomplished and how well I think the schedule is really working, and decide if major changes need to be made at that point.

To that end, and I didn't plan on talking about this right now but it seems to fit... I need to decide if it's a good idea to try to add one more thing to my plate. Off and on, over the months, I have considered becoming a Pure Romance consultant. If you don't know what Pure Romance is, it's one of THOSE home parties. You know, the happy-fun-time ladies-only parties? Yeah. Those. They're lots of fun, and they seem to be very popular, and they're right up my alley, and I like home parties, and folks that do them consistently seem to make decent money doing it. Those are all pros for it. The cons would be - I have to spend time on yet another business, AND I have to build in time for having home parties. That's a fully hands-on (heh heh) business. You pretty much don't make the cash if you aren't out selling the goods. I have a couple friends who are consultants, and there's a sale on the consultant kits right now, and I was talking to them tonight and getting myself all revved up - until I looked at my schedule and realized that having parties doesn't exactly fit into it. You see, I pretty much work until 11 pm each day. My time is scheduled from the moment I wake up until the moment I go to sleep, and while some of that 'work' involves things like cleaning my house, making dinner, and taking care of my children, the rest of it revolves around Heritage Makers and writing. Those are the two things I decided to focus on right now, the two businesses I decided to build. It's hard for me to reel in my enthusiasm for my other ideas... I want, for example, to start building my Not House On The Rock house, or to open my B&B, or to start selling Pure Romance, or whatever. Most of my other dreams can be built on the success of these first two though, which is why I've been able to reel myself in and try to be patient on those other fronts. The Pure Romance doesn't exactly fit in with everything else. It's a separate dream, one of those "this would be totally fun!" dreams.

So, in looking at my schedule, something would have to give in order to accommodate it. Do I want something else to give? I'm not really sure. I don't want to give up my writing; I love it, and I'm excited about it, and I wish I had more time to do it. I love Heritage Makers, though that's been really slow going (largely because I haven't, until this month, really put time aside for it or really had a concrete plan going in order to promote it and work on it with my customers). I think that if I was going to do Pure Romance, I'd have to give up Heritage Makers. I'm not sure that's what I want to do. I don't want to do it to replace anything, I just want to do it because it would be fun. But I think a lot of things would be fun, and I just don't have time to do them all. That's a tough reality for me. I'm going to have to spend some time thinking about which of those I really want to do, and which of them I think has the most long-term potential for me.

So, aside from that tangent... I've been working pretty hard. I made a deal with myself that I would treat these things like a regular job and stick to this schedule Monday-Friday. If I need to take a night off, then I have to pick it up over the weekend. So basically I'll give myself two days off a week, and I'm aiming for Saturday and Sunday, but since I work for myself I can be flexible.

Now, as to the 'money' part of my post - yeah. I'm not actually making any yet. :) Well, I do get a commission from Heritage Makers, so that's not entirely true - if I'm selling things, I'm making money. But as far as the writing goes yet, my payoff is merely your love and adoration. I'm hoping to see some money from it in the near future, but for now I'm still laying the foundation. Building fans (i hope!), getting my name out there, blogging, networking, all while I work on short stories and novels, in the hopes that one day they will be published. It's been a while since I sat down to work on stories, and I have to say I'd forgotten how much harder it is (at least for me) to write fiction than to write about whatever's on my mind. Blogging, for me, is EASY. I just sit down and words spew from my fingers. I can write about what's on my mind for hours. Crafting a good fiction story is a lot more work! I have great ideas, I have ideas ALL THE TIME, but turning them into something cohesive and fun that other people want to read is another matter. I'm not complaining, I love it, all of this is great practice and it's fun and this is the best job I've ever had (it's also currently the worst paying job I've ever had, but I'm confident that will turn around one day). It's just a bit amusing to me, how easy it is to write like this and how much harder it is to make things up.

So, that's my story for now. As far as the house goes, we're in the process of tackling the laundry room right now. I've promised myself a horror movie marathon as soon as the basement is clean, so that's good motivation. Oh! I've built exercise into every day too. I'm hoping to see some health payouts from that soon. The one thing I'm struggling with, health-wise, is calorie tracking. I'm terrible about doing it. So if anyone wants to bug me daily, or even several times a day, to keep track of my calories, please feel free. I definitely need to make that a habit. Money, we're just trying our best to pay down debt. We took a somewhat impromptu trip to Memphis in order to pick up a car my husband bought last weekend, and that was a little bit of a hit in the pocketbook, even though it was fun. We still struggle with impulsiveness and with making good FRUGAL financial decisions. The old "two steps forward, one step back" method. The eternal optimist in me keeps whispering that I'll sell some bestsellers this year and none of that will matter. The realist's voice gets overshadowed pretty frequently. I need to work on bolstering my inner realist. :)

But overall, we're in pretty good spirits most of the time, things are moving along quite nicely, and life is good.

Kids' Room! Still Clean!

So Leslie took up my invitation yesterday and asked to see my kids' room. The trouble there was that I promised to post it after 9pm last night... and my kids were already in bed. Going in and turning on lights to take pictures and video wasn't exactly an option! Today was crazy-busy and I'm just now getting to the pictures and the posting, but I promise that this is how the room looked when they went to bed last night. I am pleased to say that they are STILL cleaning up their toys every night before bed - we've turned it into part of the routine and it just hasn't been a problem. Yesterday some of Oksana's toys ALMOST went in the garbage (yeah I'm THAT mom) because she wouldn't come away from the computer and clean up when I asked her to... some things actually went into a garbage bag before she rescued them and put them away, so I'm hoping that's all it will take for them to know I am serious and that won't be a problem again.

As I've mentioned before, it's a small room, and with two of them AND all their toys (since we don't have a separate play area either) in there, organizing it has always been a challenge. The key was finally finding the right combination of kid-friendly storage bins to hold the STUFF. And also building an extra shelf on the wall (we already had one, but needed two). And, finally, GETTING RID OF STUFF. We still have a LOT of toys; probably too many - but I got rid of excess, of stuff they have grown too old for, of stuff that I decided was dumb, of stuff that we just didn't have room for. If you're afraid you're going to purge a favorite that you didn't KNOW was a favorite - bag the stuff up and put it somewhere unobtrusive (a closet, the basement, the garage) for a week or two. If the kids don't miss the items during that time, they're probably never going to notice the stuff is gone. And off to Goodwill it goes!

Moving forward, my plan is to purge the bins when they get full - but I'm going to have the kids purge them. Stuff is limited to the size of the bin in which it belongs - if, for instance, their dress-up bin overflows, it's time for them to decide which items they want to give away. If they HAVE to keep it all, then they can designate a second dress-up bin, BUT that will mean some of their other toys have to go. That's my plan, anyway.

And now, a photo tour!

The view from the doorway:

To the right is the shelving unit holding all of the larger stuffed animals. Directly across from the doorway is the dresser; clothing inside, books and games on top. Across and to the left is their bunk bed. Directly to the left, almost invisible from this angle, is one of the Sterilite-drawer towers I put together.

Next to the door:

The stuffed animal shelving unit and the other Sterilite-drawer tower. Every drawer is labelled; every toy category gets its own drawer, and every item they own has a place. This has proved crucial in keeping the room clean.

The dresser:

Clothes and pull-ups inside. Books and games on top. Oksana's dollhouse on the floor. It is an awkward place for it; it works for now but I have to move it every time I want to get a pair of pants for her. I'm hoping to find a better place for it once we move the kitchen out of their room.

The bed:

Their bunk bed is from IKEA. I love it; they love it. It's not as tall as a traditional bunk bed and I feel safe having them use it. Oksana's mattress is on the floor so we don't have to worry about her falling out of bed. Having a bunk bed is a HUGE space saver in the room; I really love it.

The kitchen:

Big, awkward, but it's a really nice set and they and their friends play with it all the time so it stays. I'm going to move it downstairs soon. It's one of the most awkward elements to their room right now. It's double-sided so I can't even push it against the wall.

The closet:

Drake's stuff on top, Oksana's on the bottom. Shoes on the floor. Shelves below each hanging rod so each kid has a place to store long toys (like foam swords) and their multitudes of bags and boxes.

The last wall:

A small toy chest that came with the house, and we still use it; a hanging IKEA dragon that holds small stuffed animals (beanies and the like); our reading chair; the other Sterilite-drawer tower. Two more bookshelves high up on the wall.

And... looking out the door from inside the room.

That's Pepper. Pardon her glowing eyes; I'm not a very good photographer (yet, anyway). My dogs follow me from room to room, expectantly, all day, every day. That's why you see them in so many of my pictures.

A video tour, if you'd rather watch that instead. I struggle taking pictures of our rooms because they aren't very big and I don't have a wide angle lens or a fisheye lens or whatever lens people use to get a good view of rooms. I always feel like the pictures just look really awkward. Which is why I always do video too. But I don't plan out my videos so my narration is, well, awkward (lol). Don't miss the part where my mom calls me in the middle of filming, that was great. I'm such a pro.



I'm in a hurry because I'm going to be late for TOPS, so I didn't proofread this at all, so if you see anything that doesn't seem right or sound right or isn't spelled right, be a doll and let me know? Or just ignore it politely, whatever you prefer! Thanks!

One More Day Of Heavy Cleaning

Today is my last official day of full-time cleaning before I start work tomorrow. And by 'start work', I mean 'actively spend a large portion of the day focusing on writing and Heritage Makers at home in an attempt to make money'.

Upstairs is looking pretty good. Downstairs is in deep peril of not being finished. The laundry/craft room, for instance, hasn't been touched at all. Cleaning out the downstairs closet left A LOT of messy boxes all over the (formerly fairly clean) bar area and family room, and I'm still sorting through the debris. I'd LIKE to have those areas completed by the end of the day, but I've also made peace with it if they're not, because I built time into my work schedule for both maintenance cleaning AND 15 minutes of continued decluttering every day for the areas I didn't finish. It's a small time slot, sure, but as I know from formerly following flylady (don't you love alliteration? I do!), 15 minutes a day can add up to real results sooner than you'd think.


original image by Anne Taintor

So that's my plan. Is there an area of my house you'd like to see? Either to see what kind of progress I've made or to see if I accomplished my goal downstairs? Ask in the comments today and I will check in at 9pm CST... whichever area has the most votes will be photographed and posted tonight.

As a reminder, 'areas' of my house are:

dining room
kitchen
hallway/pantry
upstairs bathroom
kids' room
master bedroom
stairway
bar area
family room
downstairs closet
downstairs bathroom
laundry/craft room
garage

I suggest you don't ask about the laundry/craft room again simply because you'll get the exact same pictures I posted last time. Seriously, it doesn't look different AT ALL. (Also, I won't be touching my garage until after the laundry/craft room, but since I don't think I've posted pictures of it, if you want to see it, that's your call.)

Anything else is fair game!

It's Almost Here...

So, a (group) great idea (actually a couple of great ideas combined) last night has lead me to being ridiculously overexcited, once again, about launching a new blog and I want to zOMG GET STARTED RIGHT AWAY! But I want to really be COMMITTED to the new blogs I launch (as well as my blogs currently in existence), and as such I am waiting until February to get them going. It's only a week away but boy howdy is it ever hard when you're overexcited!

In other news... February is only a week away?? Holy chips! I thought about my cleaning goals last night and have come to accept that I'm not likely to reach them. I was overambitious. I always am. The good news is that I know I can get the 'house' clean (the laundry/craft room is, sadly, a room I sort of don't even consider part of the 'house' since we don't use it hardly at all, and haven't for years). I am reasonably certain I can even make good headway in the laundry/craft room. I do not think I'm going to get to the garage. Not only is it a NIGHTMARE out there, worse even than the laundry/craft room... I only have a week to get the rest of this stuff taken care of, AND it's JANUARY. In CHICAGO. And my garage is OUTSIDE. (And detached, which makes it even colder.) I'm not saying I'm going to ignore it completely... but I won't be heartbroken if I don't hit my self-imposed time limit either. I'm not giving up, mind you! But I know it's going to be rough. Especially since I have a PTA newsletter to write and publish, some work to do on the family reunion I'm planning this year, and we're having a play date this Saturday, then going out with friends, so pretty much all of Saturday is lost.

I need to take a little time to think about how I'm going to schedule my days once February starts. I need to make time for my maintenance cleaning... I will need to make a little time for further decluttering of the laundry/craft area and garage (I may adopt the Flylady technique of '15 minutes decluttering a day'... slow and steady)... I want to make time for Heritage Makers, for writing (blogs AND my novel), and for spending time with the kids / family. That may not sound like a lot of things, but I can easily spend a LOT of time on any ONE of those items. Scheduling and time management has always been tricky for me.

It's almost February! Be on the alert for some exciting new things from me in the coming weeks :)

Craft Room? More Like CRAP Room!

I knew when I opened myself up to scrutiny that some things would be painful. But I promised full disclosure, I did! I also knew that when I invited you to ask me to see some of my rooms, inevitably the ONE room I hate/fear the most, the one room that is going to be most difficult for me, the one room that I haven't even attempted to tackle in years - THAT would be the room you'd most want to see.

My laundry / craft room is the room that, assuming I stick to my schedule today, I will start tackling tomorrow. This room fills me with anxiety not only because it is so full of stuff that the task is daunting, but also because I have a real phobia about spiders, and i KNOW there are some lurking in there. Of course the weekend is over after today, which means my husband is back to work tomorrow, which means I am all alone during the days. No one to help me battle this complete and irrational terror. It's going to be really hard, and people, I've only given myself three days to complete this room. This will require Herculean effort and strength of will on my part. So, feel free to ask me again mid-week to see this room, and we'll see where I'm at.

In the meantime, here it is. Photo AND video.

When you first walk in, you can see the washer and dryer. We've talked about moving them over to the far right wall and making a better working area for the laundry, but then my 'craft' area would be here, and I just don't know which is better for me yet. I guess cleaning out the room is the first step, then finishing it off, and then we can figure out placement of everything.


To your left, we have: water heater. Furnace. Cat litter box and food area. Fridge/freezer we haven't opened for a long time. White shelving units that have been piled up with crap. Laundry sorting bins.


I have a dream of maybe making this my 'disaster preparedness' storage area, for extra food and supplies, so we will be ready to face the Zombie Armageddon when it comes.


To the right, we have my 'craft' area. There's a desk in there, somewhere. And lots of craft supplies. In boxes and bags. There's also a whole lot of... crap. I don't even know what's in half of these boxes. This stuff piled up during many 'hide that shit, people are coming over!' cleaning marathons over the years, until it pretty much got full, and then we've just... left it.


More of that crap to the right, and another shelving unit that's full of crap.


And if the pictures weren't enough... here's a video tour for you to, erm, enjoy.


Like I said, feel free to ask me about this room mid-week, or a week from now. Hopefully the situation in here will be VASTLY improved.

What Do You Want To See?

So I've been thinking about offering up an extra 'feature' (heh) on my blog. I'm still struggling with disorganization, but lately I've been treating 'getting the house organized' as a full time job (more or less), and I've set a lot of self-imposed deadlines that will, if followed, ultimately get me to a clean and organized home by the end of the month.

We've come pretty far. I'm actually, at this moment, on track and on schedule. Tomorrow's tasks are going to be a little dicey, time wise, but I'll give it my best effort.

At any rate, in the interest of complete disclosure, and as an additional incentive to clean my house and KEEP it clean... I'm inviting you all to be drop-in guests, anytime, as it were. Anytime you feel like it, drop in on my latest post and ask me to see a certain room / area of my house. When I get the comment, I will comply with a picture and/or video post of said area WITHOUT CHANGING THE CONDITION OF SAID AREA FIRST. Hopefully it'll give me a little incentive to keep up with the work I've done and to finish getting everything organized too! And if it's been a while and you've been wondering 'hey, did she ever finish that laundry room?' (NO) or 'hey, I wonder if they can finally use their downstairs bathroom?' (YES) - just ask!

So here are the 'areas' of my house. Some have been tackled, some are in progress, some haven't been touched in months, maybe years.

Dining Room
Kitchen
Upstairs Hall / Pantry
Upstairs Bathroom
Master Bedroom
Kids' Bedroom
Stairwell / Back Entry
Bar Area
Family Room
Downstairs Bathroom
Laundry /Craft Room
Garage
Yard

Tonight I invite you all to vote on which area you'd most like to see, and I will post it in the morning once we're all up and moving (so probably lunchtime. We're not exactly morning people.).

And in the future, feel free to comment spontaneously and say "Hey, show me your ____ (room, people!)".

storage solutions

It's "show us your..." day over at Saucy Dwellings, and today it's saucy storage solutions! How coincidental; I've just been working on storage solutions for my home myself. I don't know if these exactly qualify as 'saucy' but this is what I posted in the comments on their blog:

Storage and organization is a HUGE issue for me, I'm terrible at it. I'm in the process of trying to give my home an organizational overhaul right now, actually. We're a family of four in a small 2-bedroom ranch house, AND I'm a packrat (*cough* slight hoarder *cough*) so I really need creative storage solutions. Here's a few things I've come up with so far.

I like things that have dual purposes, so that's what I'm really trying to look for when I pick storage containers.

My bedroom:
This is my bedside table. It's an old school desk I had when I was a kid; you can still see remnants of the Pac-Man and Flintstones stickers I used to 'decorate' it long ago! I repurposed it to be a nightstand / jewelery / dressing table. My jewelery box and a few larger accessories are perfect for displaying on top...


... and all those little boxes and large pieces fit perfectly inside, yet I still have enough room to peer in and find what I'm looking for. Though I may get some dividers in the future (I just set this up two days ago, heh.)


Kids' Bedroom:
Stuffed animals are the bane of my existence, I swear! but the kids are really attached to them. This old shelving unit (that previously housed a big stereo system and CD's for us) ended up being perfect for the critters, which previously lived in my children's beds. Which meant my kids were sleeping ON animals all the time, and it was really immensely difficult to change the sheets.
I also went out last weekend and bought a bunch of those plastic Sterilite stackable drawers at Target, because we were overrun with toys. There's another 'unit' just like this on the other side of the room. They're colorful and sturdy, perfect for kid-stuff storage. They're also a pretty good size, and only $8 a piece! I used my labelmaker, labeled each drawer with a category of toy... and so far, the kids have been REALLY good about keeping their room picked up (they are 3 and 5). I've also found that they are PLAYING with their toys a lot more, and they seem to have a lot more fun when they can find the toys they want. They've thanked me no less than ten times in the past week for doing this. I guess cleaning really IS a good thing! LOL As a bonus, I get to store stuff on top of these 'units' that I don't want my kids playing with quite yet.


Our Dining Room / Entryway:
Unfortunately our front door comes right into the dining room. No foyer, no mudroom, nowhere convenient to put hooks or coatracks or anything. Enter my grandmother's cedar chest.


Not only is it nice and deep and perfect for holding all our winter gear, it also provides extra seating for the room AND it's the perfect place for the kids to sit and put on boots / shoes.


It actually has some really gorgeous copper 'buckles' but they are currently being stored in my closet because I don't believe they'd outlast my kids and dogs, heh.

And so that's it. I'm still doing some major overhauling of the house, things are looking good, and I've been trying to work up to a post about all the work I've been doing. Unfortunately I'm also on a tight (self-imposed) schedule so I haven't exactly made the time to sit here and update in a while. (But expect more house posts in the near future!)

ALSO-also, we just got a new camera and I'm still trying to figure out how to take good pictures with it. And the self-imposed tight schedule hasn't afforded me a whole lot of time to read up on it OR play around with it.

Tonight is Oksana's preschool 'winterfest' program; you know, the thing all preschoolers do around the holidays (or not, this year, since they wanted to be PC I guess) where they get together and sing cute songs and all we parents go and ooh and aah at our little stars and starlets? Yeah, that. Wish me luck that I will have mastered the camera enough to get some decent pictures tonight!

Being Thankful

It's time to fess up here and admit that I have another blog. Well, I have several other blogs actually, but the one in particular that I'm fessing up about right now is a livejournal account that I've had since 2001. It's primarily friends-only and at this point it's staying that way; I have cultivated a really great friends group over the years and it's become a great place for me to share a lot of my more personal details, my raw thoughts and emotions, and a lot more angst than I'm willing to share in this more public arena. I'll share a LOT here, but sometimes things are just too private for the entire world (yes, even for me, heh).

So yesterday morning I was feeling a little down and panicky for no good reason, and almost posted a real downer Facebook status (because one of the best ways for me to exorcise my mental and emotional demons is to WRITE THEM OUT and then I can move on)... but in a rare display of discretion, I decided Facebook was not the place for it. So I went to my trusty Livejournal and I posted "I'm really afraid I'm going to die before I am able to turn my life into the life I want to be living. And I just don't think that's appropriate as a facebook status so I'm posting it here instead. I guess I should probably talk about that in therapy tonight."

And in response, I got some really good thoughts, advice, and kicks in the butt from my awesome friends. Things like:

"I think most of us spend most of our lives trying to live the life we think we want. I try to focus on what's good now. Otherwise I would go crazy. When I do that, I realize I have it pretty good. Doesn't stop me from wanting to move home or wanting a professor job or criticizing my husband or generally wishing for more, but it helps."

"You can't do that & stay sane, I don't care how much therapy you go to. Live in the moment. Appreciate the eensy bittle things. Just LIVE every moment."

"Two of the quotes I have on my Facebook page:
"Be happy for this moment. This moment is your life." ~ Omar Khayyam
"To dream of a person you would like to be is to waste the person you are" ~ Unknown
I really try to live those quotes each and every day."

I really appreciate the encouragement everyone gave me yesterday about that post. I needed a little kick in the butt. It's hard sometimes to be thankful for what you have, and I guess sometimes I blur the lines between appreciating the life I have NOW (which is a pretty good life, most days) and the goals I want to achieve. Sometimes I get so hungry for those goals that I lose sight of the present and I despair pretty quickly. The therapy is more for THAT... not for making me happy with who I am, because really most of the time I AM - but for trying to deal with this intense need for instant gratification and the fact that I have trouble setting limits in my life. I don't know if it's the therapy, or the blogging, or ten years of ruminating and working towards it, but I finally feel like a lot of pieces are coming together in my life and I really do feel like I'm making a lot of progress on at least one of the issues that has plagued me for so long. (My clutter issues.) And I do feel confident that, once I get that under control, I can deal with roadblock two (my weight) and roadblock three (my finances). I feel more confident than ever that it really WILL all come together, finally. I still have times though where I get really impatient about it, or times when I get scared... especially in terms of my health. I believe I've mentioned it here before, but in case I haven't, I have Type II diabetes. I was diagnosed almost two years ago. It is VITAL that I lose weight and exercise more and eat better to get healthier, and I really feel like my house clutter is tied into some of that (letting things go is as hard for me as letting pounds go, and preparing healthy foods is impossible for me when my kitchen is a mess), and I do feel like I can't tackle my weight and health issues without getting the house in order first. I work on both to a small extent, but I know from past experience that if my house isn't in order, I just plain won't be able to work past that and take better care of myself. I don't know WHY that is; I just know that it is. So I'm working on it. But then something will happen, even if it's not something big; I'll have a day where I feel lousy, or I have this phantom arm pain that we haven't been able to figure out yet (the doctor thinks it's a stress/muscle issue but I really think it's tied into my blood sugar because it happens most often when my eating habits for the day SUCK), and I get freaked out about my diabetes and my health and the damage this could do to my body and the fact that I'm only 31 and I don't want to leave my family mother/wifeless and the fact that I'd really like to have another baby in a couple years but that cannot happen with the state of everything right now, but most especially with the state of my HEALTH (I will not subject my body to that stress in the state it's in now, I just won't, nor would it be safe for the baby), and then I get hung up on dying young and that's when I REALLY start to feel like everything is taking WAY too long to accomplish and I start to despair.

So I need to remind myself... baby steps. The baby steps I've taken have gotten me pretty far, and get me a little farther every day, and a little closer to my goals. I have to keep doing my best, and have faith that the universe and the powers that be will guide me to my goals, and not kill me off too soon (I hope!). None of us get any guarantees in life and we just have to do the best we can with what we have. I've certainly made mistakes in the past; we all have. I'm doing my best to recover from some of those mistakes, and most days now I feel like I'm doing a good job, and doing my best. Most days are good days.

There's an exercise on Facebook right now to post a new status every day from now until Thanksgiving about what you are thankful for. It starts out easy, but I'm sure it'll get harder as the days go on. It can be really hard to focus on everything we have to be thankful for. I'm taking the challenge because it's definitely something I need to do.

I'd like to invite everyone here to take some time to tell me what you have to be thankful for right now. We could all use some positivity in our lives, and a little bit of perspective; seeing what everyone has to be thankful for would be a great place to start.

Old Habits Die Hard

One day. One day can make a HUGE difference.

Yesterday I took one day off from the household routines I am trying to implement, the routines that I believe will keep my house clean. The routines that HAVE been, to this point, keeping the rooms in my house that I'd already finished, clean.

Well, I wouldn't exactly call it a day 'off' because I spent a good portion of the morning shopping for household items. But it was a day off in the sense that I did NOT do my routines at all, not even after I got back from shopping. After shopping, we took a family trip to the park and enjoyed the beautiful and unexpected 70 degree November weather we are having this weekend. Then we came home, had dinner, watched Bolt together, put the kids to bed, spent some 'couples' time gaming together, and had sleepovers with our children. No, the day was not 'off', nor was it wasted at all.

But in not doing my routines, I noticed that the house got mucked up in an almost unbelievable fashion. Especially the kitchen; the counters are covered in dishes and garbage and old food. From ONE. DAY. What a difference! Like a bomb went off.

Here is where old habits die hard. In the past, I have been TERRIBLE about cleaning up after myself. Terrible. I just leave things wherever they are when I am finished with them. (Including dishes and garbage.) This makes the cleaning process much more difficult when it is time to do my routines each day, because there is so much more to pick up all at once. Doing it as I go would likely be much easier. This SEEMS logical, yet it's a skill I appear to be lacking.

I've been working on it. I've gotten much better at throwing garbage out right away; taking dishes to the sink. Putting toys and books back when I'm done with them, and so on. Trying to encourage my family to do the same. We're all learning.

Yesterday was not such a good day in this department. Instead of wallowing in it, I am trying to be much more AWARE of it, so that I can see how damaging it is (and how quickly it filthifies the house!), and CHANGE it.

Starting now, with my daily household chores.

a weight on my mind

It's a well-known fact amongst my family, friends and readers that I am a 'stuff' person. Since my youth, it's been safe to say I'm a packrat. In my adult life, I would even dare to admit that I have something of a hoarding problem. If you've read even a little bit of my blog, you know that I consider this to be one of the three main roadblocks that hold me back from achieving many of my dreams. Over the years, there have been times I've felt like I've made considerable progress with this problem... and times when I've felt like I've landed back at square one, doomed to forever be buried under mountains of clutter. Sometimes I lament the fact that I have too much stuff, and entertain fantasies of burning it all... or, in my less desperate hours, fantasize about opening my house in some manic "sell off my life" sort of estate sale. Getting rid of it all, and starting over at square one. Other times, I lament the fact that our house is too small and become intensely desperate to move to a much larger home. (Always after these thoughts do I kick myself in the butt; I do believe we need a larger space for our family, but it should NOT be because of STUFF!)

Recently I've felt, once more, that I've been making progress on this problem. I am at a place in my life where I can look back and realize that I HAVE made a lot of progress over the years. I still get frustrated, and I still backslide; if I were being honest I would admit to you that more than half of our home is currently practically unlivable due to the mountains of stuff in the rooms. I would also have to admit to you that, as recently as last week, our entire house was like that; it has only been in the past few days that I've managed to get most of the upstairs back into clean, uncluttered space. Despite the backsliding, and despite the fact that I sometimes feel like I'm living the definition of insanity (doing the same thing over and over but expecting a different result each time), I really DO believe I've made progress over the years. Here's why:

Certainly I'm no psychologist, but for me, keeping / hoarding all of these items is largely a mental issue. I have huge emotional ties to my stuff. I have spent probably the last ten years coming to terms with that fact, trying to understand it, admiring my friends and family who are minimalists, reading and studying the tenets of living a simple life, and working hard to embrace that philosophy myself. A lot of internal meditation and rumination has gone on for the past decade. I am at a place where I have accepted that I will probably never be a MINIMALIST, and indeed I don't think I WANT to be... but I don't feel a need to suffocate myself with THINGS anymore. I am comfortable letting things go, even things I once loved and treasured dearly. I have come up with ways to memorialize the important things and people in my life without needing physical mementos. I no longer feel panicky when I think of letting the majority of my things go. This isn't perfect, of course; there are still things I have attachments to, and sometimes when I'm purging I have to sit and really think about each item before I can part with it. And, of course, some things will be staying. But I feel now like I am choosing to surround myself with quality items; items that REALLY mean something to me, rather than boxes upon boxes of 'treasures' I have collected, 'treasures' which I never even saw because they were in piles or stacks or boxed in the garage or laundry room. I can't really tell you exactly how I got here, other than to say that I spent a LOT of time (ten years, at least!) thinking about it and trying really hard to get here. Pushing myself out of my comfort zone, time and time again. I also have to give a lot of props to Flylady and her system. I have been on and off the Flylady system numerous times in my life, and while I must say that to date, following her system exactly has NEVER worked for me... there are a great deal of small tips and tricks and philosophies of hers that I have picked up and follow religiously. I maintain a sort of control journal that helps me keep the house clean (when it's decluttered, which admittedly has been rare so far, but getting better!). I use my timer constantly, and often tell myself 'you can do anything in 15 minutes!'. (I work in a lot of 15-minute bursts, and when I get on a roll, those are some of my most productive days.) And her philosophies about decluttering... I've railed against them for years, but I've slowly come to realize she's right.

You see, Flylady strongly encourages decluttering... purging your things, giving them away to bless others (AND bless yourself by having a clean, decluttered life and home!). You can't organize clutter, she says. Well, that one was an eye-opener for me right away. If you're an organized person by nature, I'm sure you're thinking 'well, DUH' right now. Those of us that are NOT 'Born Organized' need these eye-openers sometimes! From the moment I read that one, it rang true. However, there was another part of her decluttering philosophy that took me years to accept. Flylady is vehemently anti-garage sale. Just give it away, she encourages her followers; you'll bless others and bring prosperity into your own life through your generosity. Garage sales are too much work and hassle and you don't get nearly enough return on the amount of work you put in. I agree with her "bless others and bring prosperity into your own life" philosophy, but I've stubbornly refused to hear her message about the garage sales. For at least FIVE YEARS now. Really; I even had a garage sale this year. I think I've had one every year since my son was born. Some years I may even have had two. The reason being that I feel like we need money to move ahead in life. Money to get out of debt, move to a bigger home to accommodate our growing family, achieve so many of my dreams. There is so much MONEY tied up in all this stuff I own that it has made me sick to just give it away. (Yes, I know about tax write-offs when you donate to charities; but somehow the idea of not getting an immediate return on my money just stuck in my craw.) It's been really immensely difficult for me to accept the fact that I wasted so many of my (and later, my family's) resources on so much useless stuff that I'm just going to TOSS now. So I've garage saled many hours of my life away; each time vowing never to do it again because it really and truly IS a pain in the ass. Then I've vowed to myself that I'm going to sell these things on ebay and craigslist! Maybe they didn't go in the garage sale but that's just because they didn't have the right BUYER! The internet reaches the whole WORLD; surely someone will see it and pay me what it's worth!

IF THIS SOUNDS FAMILIAR TO YOU TOO, LET ME STOP YOU RIGHT NOW AND TELL YOU: THIS IS A DELUSION. Unless you have some really awesome stuff. And by awesome I mean ACTUALLY antique or collectible (not just in your own mind). If you're like me and you have a lot of awesome-to-you stuff, but it doesn't hold a lot of monetary value, you're not going to get much for it. And you know what else? It's a huge hassle to post all that stuff! Let alone manage the inventory and then box it and ship it if it sells. Especially when you're trying to declutter and you're already surrounded by mounds of stuff. If I had a warehouse to store the sale items in, and I managed it like a job, it might work. But I don't; I'm working against myself, because I keep making piles of stuff to sell in different areas of my house, and then we trip over them and other stuff lands on them and before you know it I'm back under mountains of clutter.

So. It's taken me a good five years to admit it, but Flylady, YOU ARE RIGHT. The stuff has to just GO. I know I will be blessing others with these things, because a lot of the items are in good shape and are still useful. But it's not blessing me or my family right now. I DO believe that in helping others we open the door for more blessings in our own life. I have already packed my car with the first load of stuff to go out the door, and I really feel like I'm lightening the load in my home by purging things.

I believe this logically, and I am now at a point where I believe this 95% emotionally as well. But there is a part of me that is not at ease with it. Mostly because, as I mentioned earlier, so much of our money has been spent on this stuff that I am now tossing. It is truly a bitter pill to swallow, to know that I could have so much more in other areas, areas I YEARN to be further along in, if I hadn't wasted so much on 'in the moment' impulses in the past. This is a lesson I am still learning, and part of me still wants to try to make a 'recovery' from it by recouping some of that money. It really cuts me to have to admit that sometimes you CAN'T recoup losses like that. I can learn from my mistakes, and I can move forward. I'm trying really hard to move forward right now. I still have a huge problem with impulse control (that's what therapy is for!). I have a lot of regrets about this 'stuff', and tonight it is sitting like a lead weight in my stomach. I know I'm going to have more issues with this as I purge more stuff. I am, in particular, dreading my basement and garage because there is a LOT of stuff that I won't do well purging. A big part of me just wants this process to be OVER already. Most of me is ready. Part of me is still hanging on.

Through it all, I'm proud of the progress I've made. I'm hopeful that this time is FINALLY the time for me, the time that I will be on my way to a less cluttered, cleaner, less stressful life. I hope that I am able to come to terms soon with the regrets I have over wasting so much money in the past. I hope that releasing my things to bless others who need them really will bring unforeseeable benefits into our lives. I hope that I continue to get a better handle on my impulses so that I can live a more fruitful life and make smarter decisions every day, especially in the realm of finance. I'm having trouble seeing the long road ahead. I'm trying really hard to make everyday decisions that will help me achieve our long term goals.

I really, really hope that this time, finally, is the time for me to get over that first road block, for once and for all.