Messy

I grew up in a messy house, at least my memory of my teenage years is such.  My parents have had a empty nest for around eighteen years and moved into a brand new house recently and still their house is far from tidy so I feel I am safe to assume that my childhood home was messy.  I am not a fan of constant mess and clutter.

We used to spend time, every week, at a friends house which was untidy, no I am going to be honest, it was more than untidy it was cluttered, messy and dirty.  That is of course my opinion I would never judge anyone on the state of their house if I had I wouldn't have stayed friends or visited the house so often.  There were times, particularly in the winter when it was too cold to sit outside that I wondered what on earth I was doing there it was with mixed emotions that we stopped visiting a few months ago.  I felt relieved and slightly guilty.

In my own house everything has to have a home, a place it could be put away.  There is a finite amount of places that things can be put away in our house so usually, around birthdays and Christmas time we have to give something away when we receive something.  I was discussing this with some friends recently and the FlyLady came into the conversation, perhaps my friend and my parents need to heed her advice.

I have perfected worked hard at the art of decluttering my house but other parts of my life, well they are messy, not in a my life is a mess sense, but more in a disorganised, flitting from one thing to another sense.  I am easily sidetracked and very fond of displacement activities when I need to do something that I would rather not be doing.  I have come to realise I am hopeless at planning ahead and saying no, so I end up with too many things in the diary and not enough time to prepare for each of them, for different reasons I was in the exact same position last year.  Hmm perhaps I could do with learning from my experience.

Everything we do outside the house involves some form of preparation be it a few bits and pieces of clothing, a picnic or a fully packed car.  When I am planning what we will do I forget about this bit.  Over the winter we tend to do less outside or that involves lots of packing, but that doesn't mean we spend the whole time at home!  But come the spring and warmer weather and suddenly we are like caged animals and I go mad putting so many things in the diary that I forget the bit about preparation.   So in a need to do better kind of effort I have once again reached that time of the year when I feel like I am going mad and have backed off organising much for the rest of the summer to keep myself sane.  What I could with doing is remembering that in the Spring, keep the bigger picture in mind, and to remind myself constantly it is ok to say no.  I am not sure how I am going to remember this so if you have tips you can share.........

Lists

I have had a few conversations with friends recently that have surprised me.  It takes a long time to get to really know someone so I suppose I shouldn't have been, surprised that it is.  But I was, because the information has changed the way I perceive them as people.  I read many blogs but only know a handful of those writers in real life, blogs often provide a snapshot or window into the writers life.  It is easy for the reader to be lulled into thinking that their lives are always that way, full of creativity, celebrations, beautiful homes and wonderful days out.  The mundane, the day to day is often absent, but it is still there in the background swamping us from time to time with their needs, crucial as they are to our existence.

I had one of those swamping moments earlier this week, with so many jobs that needed doing I wrote myself a list.  I used to be a compulsive list writer.  In the days when I was in paid employment I needed them to function and remember the many tasks I needed to do, although they were also depressing as I often crossed a job off the top of the list and wrote another on the bottom.  My list, written this week, was done so in trepidation.  When I became a mother I ceased being a jobs list writer, most of the time the list would bash me round the head with all the undone jobs on it.  I was  sporadic about cleaning and keeping things tidying, doing it when I had moments here and there or when visitors were imminent.  My children are a little older now and Mondays have turned into a morning for the house, a bit of cleaning, tidying and ironing.  This is all works fine until a few Mondays in a row we are not at home, or doing something else and then we go away, return, have a busy week and the house takes on the burgled look.

Last year we took a lot of camping trips, in the space of three months we did five.  Whilst planning these into the diary I failed to remember how long it takes to organise, the week before for preparing, then being away and the week after for putting away.  Three weeks for each trip and the whole of three months disappeared into a camping hole.  We loved each trip but it was too much.  This year I have had one trip in the same period but foolishly filled the time before and after with lots of other stuff so the putting away in particular just didn't happen.  What did happen is more getting stuff out so that my hall resembled a Kim's game, remember that, ha ha!  A kettle, a plastic cup, the remains of days out bags with coats, jumpers, waterproofs, paperwork files some of this in bags some on the floor and underneath it all I found a half emptied veg bag we have delivered each week.

So, I worked my way, not very efficiently through my list.  Hoovering that should be easy to complete but I need to tidy first play the game of moving things from one room to another.  The house is tidy, hoover is out and I am poised to start and my phone starts bleeping.  An alarm to check for an email.  I check the email and get sidetracked with a few blogs.......then the washing machine bleeps it has finished its cycle.  The washing is hung and another load in, back to the hoovering......no wait it is hungry time the children want lunch.  My hoovering did get done and the list was completed but in the future I think I will stick to meal plans and shopping lists and write a note to self to keep diary clear around camping trips......are you a list writer?

Organising

Welcome to the May edition of the Simply Living Blog Carnival - Daily Lives cohosted by Mandy at Living Peacefully with Children, Laura at Authentic Parenting, Jennifer at True Confessions of a Real Mommy, and Joella at Fine and Fair. This month, we write about what we do to keep the little things from overwhelming us. Please check out the links to posts by our other participants at the end of this post.

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In the days when I was a paid employee I was highly organised at work.  It was a skill that I was proud of, I knew I was good at it and it helped me get prompted.  However those skills always seemed to remain at work, at home I was the opposite it was almost as if I had used up all my organising capacity at work and there was none left for home.  I would forget people's birthdays, pay bills late, shop on a different day each week, run out of food constantly and so on, it didn't matter what tools I used to try to remember they didn't really work for long if at all.  When I stopped working I thought that I might become more organised at home and slowly over the years I have become so, until recently when I realised that I am almost, if not, at the level of organisation I had at work.

I have tried many tools including a wall calendar, my phone, pieces of paper and a diary on my computer for lots of different reasons none of these worked so for this year have gone back to a paper diary and am loving it.  I have written all the birthdays, reminders to renew insurance and dates for annual payments in it.  Each double page has a week to view on one page and a lined notebook on the other, I use this to record things going on that we might want to do such as plays, events, festivals, guided nature walks and the like when I find out about them, what I need to be doing in my garden as I am following the biodynamic method this year and possible trips away for camping, visiting family or holidays.

At the beginning of each week I start planning the next one, when I have an outline plan of what we are going to do, I then start to plan my meals based around the contents of a veg box I have delivered and what we are going to be doing in that week.  All my food shopping is based on a meal plan for seven days of lunches and evening meals, I don't decide which meal for which day but I do have some really quick to make meals in case we are late home any evenings.

Writing all this down makes me realise how highly organised I sound which I am but it has also meant that I am actually much more efficient.  I am managing to fit in gardening on at least three or four occasions in most weeks.  I have more time for sewing, knitting and reading all of which I really enjoy.  But most important of all I have more time to do things with the children, be it reading to them, making things together or just talking.

By looking ahead and thinking about future weeks I hope that, weather permitting, we are able to have more camping trips this year as I have planned them in my diary and talked to friends or family who want to join us this is something I have talked about doing for the last couple of years but could only fit the odd hastily put together trips as I left it until the last minute.

Having all my plans together in one small book which I can fit in my bag has been the making of my organising and freeing up time a side effect I did not expect!

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Thank you for visiting the Simply Living Blog Carnival cohosted by Mandy at Living Peacefully with Children, Laura at Authentic Parenting, Jennifer at True Confessions of a Real Mommy, and Joella at Fine and Fair. Read about how others are incorporating stress relieving actions into their daily day lives. We hope you will join us next month!

• Keeping Stress at Bay From Day to Day - Laura at Authentic Parenting sums up some of the things she does to avoid being overwhelmed.
• How I Stay Sane! - ANonyMous @ Radical Ramblings discusses the coping mechanisms she has to stay sane when her life is chaotic and often stressful.
• Organising - sustainablemum talks about how spending time planning ahead has given her more time for life!
• Simple Menu Planning for New Moms - No longer a lady of leisure, new mom Mercedes at Project Procrastinot has had to rethink her cooking style in order to maximize her time in the kitchen.
• Happy Homes/Peaceful Homes - According to Lisa at Squishable Baby, It's the things that bring us closer together as a family - that keep our home Peaceful.
• Keeping It Simple - At Living Peacefully with Children, Mandy focuses on keeping things simple so that she can spend her time enjoying her family.

Lunch

A while ago I decided that I would extend my meal plans to include lunches too.  I had been wavering for a while, it felt like it would be a bit too organised most of my friends are impressed that I plan my evening meal as none of them do so to add lunches as well?  I can't believe I took so long to cross that bridge, I tried it for a week and it was the best move I have made in a long time.  It now means that I no longer have a 12 o'clock moment of oh my it is lunch time what are we going to eat and I have the ingredients in the house to actually make something interesting as opposed to sandwiches every day.

So recently I have included, omelettes, couscous or quinoa salads, soups, new, to me, homemade breads, homemade tortillas, buckwheat pancakes, cheese scones, bean salad and deep fried cheddar balls.  So many of these I would like to have made in the past but I did not have the right ingredients or enough time to make them but with a bit of forward planning our lunches are far more interesting, ready at a time when we are hungry and healthy!