Tag Archives: clutter

Brain Clutter

Since the arrival of Child #2, I’ve finally come to understand that “cluttered house = cluttered mind” thing. Up to this point in my life, I’ve always been a bit of a hoarder. Add to that my less than perfect housekeeping skills, throw in the trails of abandoned toys, books and other miscellany that follow your average 4-year-old around, and finally stir in a generous helping of baby paraphernalia, and you can picture the disaster zone that is our house these days. Sigh.

Even if I was a better housekeeper I doubt I’d be keeping on top of it all. I honestly did not realise that with a second child, in terms of workload, one plus one suddenly equals three. I’m sure it will improve as Niamh gets older and they start to occupy one another, but for now, the equation just isn’t favourable.

At night, after the small people are in bed, I desperately want to be being creative. I want to be stitching. I want to be sewing. I want to be crafting funky little things. I want to get back to dyeing, and I want to be working on some web stuff. But all those things I should be doing (dishes, laundry, clearing up…….), they’re still there! And I feel guilty doing fun stuff while the work’s still waiting. So I have this never-ending ‘to do’ list occupying every space in my brain, and I just feel completely and utterly overwhelmed by it all, and of course, nothing’s getting done, fun or otherwise!

So. Enough of the problem. I’m working on a solution.

I do love this comment I found on finslippy’s blog :

There are 24 hours in the day, which is plenty to get things done. If that doesn’t seem enough for some reason, you can cut back on sleep, which will give you an additional 6-8 hours. Plenty of time.

Yep, that should work!

What I’m doing (or beginning to try to do, at least), is working on my packrattiness. I’m starting to declutter. Less stuff, less to clean up, right? There is so much in our house that we just don’t need to have, and I’m finally starting to do something about that.

I’ve unpacked boxes of books labelled (I kid you not) “Packed in 2002”! We’ve been through those and other books and set aside two boxes for secondhand sale. We’ve set aside a box of kitchen gear to donate to the op shop. I’ve been through my accumulated craft miscellany and ditched a boxload of that (some went to Finn’s pre-school). I’ve set aside a variety of stuff (craft, stitching, baby gear) for ebaying. I’m feeling good about the start I’ve made, though I know there’s so, so much more to be done, and it’s still really hard for me to do. It will make a difference – our house will be more useable, and hopefully it will start clearing the way for me to get to the fun-stuff more often.

My Precioussss!

It would seem that I am a hoarder. Well, OK, I actually knew that. But what I didn’t know is how extraordinarily difficult it is for me to throw anything away. Our impending move is making this problem abundantly clear to me. Books are the worst, it is just agonizing for me to try culling our collection. I am slightly better at throwing OtherHalf’s books into the ‘must-go’ pile, but books I’ve amassed myself are a whole different story :giggle: We did manage to donate half a box of ancient cookbooks to the Op-shop – mostly lovely 1970’s offerings, full of that peculiarly orange style of photography, and wholly unappetizing recipes. Practically everything else has been boxed up to take with us (including the books OtherHalf rescued from my must-go pile!)

But hey… books are understandable, right? Lots of people cling dearly to their book collections. I’m totally sane. Well. Except for the next bit…

Today, it was the bathroom cupboard’s turn to be trimmed down. Our new house (hee… those words still give me a little thrill) has no storage in the bathroom. Well, it has a very narrow little medicine cabinet thingy behind the mirror. But nothing else. So until we manage to scrape some cash together for renovation (that may be quiiiiiite a while), we have to pare down what we keep in the bathroom. Hmmmm. Seems we have about a million bottles of sunscreen lotion, and the same again of moisturiser. And hair product, and fragrance… where the heck did it all come from? And why am I physically incapable of throwing it out?! This is crazy stuff. For goodness sake, Finn was weaned 18 months ago. Why do I need to keep nursing pads? I honestly can’t explain my behaviour – I did manage eventually to bag and bin about a third of what was there (nursing pads included), but there is still more that should go… and I just can’t seem to do it! I have adopted the plan that instead of throwing it out, we should use it up. So for the next 6 weeks, expect me to be frightfully moist, sun-protected, hair-styled and smelly aromatic, in a bid to get rid of the bottles in our cupboard. Or, you know, you could come over and throw them out while my back is turned!

I think I’ll cry when I get to my mountains of crafty-stuff 🙁