And now for the books.

Did you think I fell off the organizing wagon?

I didn’t. I’ve just been ridiculously busy, and I had to wait for a window of opportunity to open back up to get to the next step.

I’ve told you about my new favorite book, the life-changing magic of tidying up. I really wish I had read this book about twenty years ago. That would have been impossible seeing as it was only written in 2011, but I am really going to do my best to teach the kids what I am learning from it.

Which is the same thing I learned when we were on vacation before I even knew about this book.

We have way too much shit in this house. And it’s all over the place.

There are papers in every room of the house. They are in the kitchen. In the mudroom. In the dining room. In the bedrooms. In the office. In the basement. In the car.

There are fucking papers everywhere!

The same goes for toys and books and kids’ clothes and pretty much everything.

And what I learned today when I was reading the life changing magic, was that there is shit everywhere here because it doesn’t all have a designated spot. It doesn’t have a designated spot because there it too much of it to designate a spot for.

But there is one place that isn’t out of control.

My closet.

My closet is still neat. You know why? Because I got rid of all the clothes that don’t “spark my joy”, and now I have more room and everything fits in its designated spot.

We all spend so much time accumulating more and more and more and more crap, and then trying to come up with ingenious ways to store it.

If I can build this shelf or get these baskets, then I can cram even more stuff into my house!

But what do we do with it?

Nothing!

Why do we need to spend so much time figuring out ways to organize stuff that we never even use?

It’s so dumb!

Because it just ends up getting messed up, especially if you have kids, and then you have to spend a whole bunch of time cleaning it up.

Who the hell has time for that? I sure as hell don’t.

So one of the things that makes this book different from other organizing books or programs is that rather than going through your house room by room and cleaning it up, you go through all your crap category by category.

First, you start with the clothes. I already did that. For mine anyway.

Next, you move onto the books.

So that’s what I started today. With the kids’ books.

We have a lot of kids’ books. But we only read a couple of them.

And I am always searching for them. The problem is that the books are all over the place.

They are on shelves in the play room.

In the bedrooms.

In the hallway.

In the office.

They are everywhere.

So today, I moved to the books.

I gathered them all in one spot, and tomorrow I will go through each one of them one by one.

I will keep the ones that spark joy.

I’m not letting the kids help, and I don’t care if you are some child psychologist who tells me this is going to traumatize them for life by not letting them be part of the process.

This house is out of control, and if I let them be involved, we’ll never get rid of anything.

Don’t worry though. We’ll keep the American Girl book.

That one has definitely sparked a whole lot of things.

Stay tuned for the final result!

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