Nesting

When someone is pregnant, they typically experience a surge sometime during their last trimester to majorly clean and organize the house in preparation of the impending chaos. Experts call it "nesting." I never experienced this. Sure, I had a desire to have a clean, neat environment in which to raise my progeny, but not the energy to put forth the effort.

Apparently, my nesting instinct strikes, oh... about 18 months AFTER the birth of my SECOND child. I am as NOT pregnant as they come, but recently, I have begun to completely clean and organize the house. Not just little spurts as in the past, but I actually have a plan for every room, and intend to do it all before the winter.

I believe the motivation came from conversations with my husband about moving. We've been talking about the little things we wish our house had and how we might want to look elsewhere to find them. However, the more I think about it, the more I realize that we really do have a great house, and we can do a lot more with what we have. There is plenty of space in this house that is just used ineffectively, and I am going to change that. Both kids have huge walk-in closets that are currenty filled with stuff they don't need. And the stuff they DO need is spread all over the house. We have a HUGE storage closet upstairs that is only about half-organized, and could really house most of the stuff in the kids' closets. We have shelves that are just covered with piles of stuff rather than organized in any reasonable way. We have a huge desk with junk crammed in and on it, rendering it (and the stuff it contains) useless.

My concern is that this won't last. I'll get part-way through the house and just give up. I think part of my stamina is coming from the fact that my job is very sit-down lately. Lots of writing and meeting. So I have an outlet for the physical activity of cleaning. But once I'm back to more running around the library, I have to keep the energy up. We'll see how it goes.

In the meantime, I've done most of the dining room, most of the master bedroom, completely done my closet, and I've done a good part of the kitchen. I'm off this weekend, so I hope to make a lot more headway then. The best part is that both Chris and I are finding it soothing and relaxing to have such a clean space, and we've started getting on the kids about leaving their stuff around. Let's see if we can really change our ways completely and get the house organized AND keep it that way. Wish us luck!