Survival Mode

Here it is.  Visual proof that I have been living in survival mode:

That's our sukkah, still up at Hanukkah.  That is, I believe, the biblical holiday equivalent of still having your Christmas tree up at Easter.

So, I've been a little busy lately.

A lot busy.  In fact, it's funny to actually look back at the life I used to characterize as "busy."  I clearly had no idea what I was talking about.

I've done survival mode before, especially after babies were born, but never for this length of time.  When I'm in survival mode, I deal strictly with the urgent.  ("Mom, Austin has pulled off his diaper again!"  "Mom, I can't find my..."  "We're out of peanut butter!")  In the back of my head, I have a firm belief that there's something, some process or method or something that I can figure out to make my life more efficient and I will suddenly find myself with time to blink, or at least breathe.  (Does anyone know where the Jetson's got that robot and those meal pills?)  As the months went by this time, though, I started to be afraid that no amount of time management implementation was going to put us on the road to serenity anytime soon.

I have found over the course of the last twelve years that any life change has the potential to force me into survival mode.  I've come, in fact, to expect it.  When a family has a new baby, moves, or faces medical or other issues, the routine is disrupted and things that worked before just don't work anymore.  And often, when the dust settles, life itself has changed.  I've learned that most of those changes require a new normal.  Rarely has a "survival mode" incident been followed by a return to things the way they were before.  New times require new strategies.

Fortunately for my family, I like strategizing!  I find the challenge of logistics invigorating.  I recently came across a "flow chart" of sorts that I had put together about seven years ago.  Justin was a tiny baby, Nathan had just started formal homeschooling, and we were living in a construction zone in an old home we were renovating.  There were problems to be solved, challenges to be overcome.  (My flow chart indicated that the key to calm out of chaos was "get up earlier.")

I am happy to report that, in our present survival mode experience, we are slowly but surely pulling ourselves out of it (the sukkah is down!)  Things are starting to take on a routine, and I'm starting to feel more on top of things.  We aren't drowning in laundry, we've finally hit on a school schedule to bring sanity to our at-home school days, and the house is starting to take on a more orderly appearance.  That makes mom happy, and when mom is happy, everyone's happy.

And a happy mom can laugh and take pictures when the boys pull something like this:

(That's mud.  Note to self:  Move getting backyard sodded to top of list.)

Stuff-itis

I don't flip through channels- usually. And I wasn't actually flipping channels, or even trying to watch TV. Honest. Steffen turned the TV on and the channel happened to be on HGTV (one of the few channels other than Fox News that we ever watch.) And guess what was on, a show called Clean Freaks! I don't know whether it's a series or just a one-time thing, but I only watched about 2 minutes and then I just recorded the rest for later.

That two minutes, however, got me thinking. There was this lady who had an ultra-organized (child-free) home. She had some good ideas. (Put rubber bands on the ends of your hangers to keep your silk dresses from sliding off. And, really, who doesn't have just scads of silk dresses littering the floor of their closets?) But her advice wasn't what caught my attention. Instead, I was floored by the amount of STUFF that she had. There were tons of gift bags and ribbon and cards and tags. All beautifully organized and labeled. Her house looked like she had bought out the Container Store.

There was a time when I was all about managing the STUFF. I love bins and labelers. (Yes, I have a labeler.) Now that I have more children and our lives have gotten far more busy, though, I've started to change my thinking. I've started to question the necessity of the STUFF. Stuff means work. It gets taken out and has to be put back. It gets broken and has to be fixed. It gets dusty and lost. Whoever said that your stuff owns you instead of the other way around had it about right.

So I started getting rid of STUFF. And, because I felt guilty about how much STUFF we had to get rid of, we've started to scale back on how much STUFF we get in the first place.

Now, we're far from minimalists. Anyone who has seen the 245,358 Playmobil pieces in our playroom can attest to that. But we are minimizing. It's a process we've been engaged in for over a year, and it's starting to have results. Each time we go through and purge, I'm amazed by how much STUFF we still have, even after all those trips to Goodwill.

Here's our latest haul, and I didn't even go through the whole house this time. You can't really tell from the picture, but those are enormous bins- like 2 feet by 3 1/2 feet. I'm trying to use the "if you haven't used it in a year, get rid of it" rule of thumb. We really can live with so much less than what we have.

The kids, by the way, are on board because they get as tired of keeping up with stuff as I do. In fact, the other day, we got a fancy catalog in the mail with all of these million dollar homes in it. I heard Megan say to Nathan, "Can you imagine how long it would take to clean that thing?"