Hey friends,
Good morning and happy Friday! Do you also feel a little weird this week because of Labor day long weekend? On Tuesday I felt like it was Monday and then I lost track of time until two days ago, when I got reminded that I had to think about the cupcakes that my boys wanted me to make to take to school for their birthday! I didn`t forget and I had it planned, but I lost track of time, thinking that I had many days ahead of me before September 6th!
And here we are, today is my boys` birthday, I feel like they are big boys now (they are turning 5!). I am experiencing so many feelings right now (happiness, gratitude, sadness, all at the same time) but I am mainly thinking that I am not sure how all this time passed by and this is a reminder to me to live and enjoy every moment, because it is so true that time flies by and these beautiful moments will not come back!!
Ok, now let`s move on, I will have time to talk about my boys` party and the celebrations in the next few weeks, after their party (I am still in the process of organizing and understanding what we want to do because the boys change their minds every day!!).
Today I wanted to talk a little about organization and to give you some little tips that have helped me a lot lately. September is to me like the beginning of a new year: Summer is over, the kids are back to school and I feel like it is time to declutter, clean and get organized and back to a routine. My kids, especially one of them as I shared before, does so much better when there is a routine that we follow and I am realizing that I do much better with a routine too. In these past few weeks, I have tried to declutter my house and get organized to go back to our schedules: I am in the middle of a cleaning/decluttering/reorganizing-everything phase and I feel so accomplished at the end of each day when I am able to put things in their place in a room or in a specific part of my house after I cleaned it from all the chaos!! I started by organizing my two toy closets in the basement, then I moved to Aurora`s bedroom (I am not done with it yet!), then to the master bathroom cabinets and kitchen cabinets (which are still a work in progress). I try to do something every day, even if it is a little task and little by little I feel like things are going back to their place. I am also trying to find better solutions about how to put clothes in the drawers or utensils in the kitchen cabinets and I am changing things around, but I think that this is exactly what organizing means: moving stuff around to make our everyday tasks easier and quicker!
So, here are a few of my tips. These are the things that help me being more productive and feeling more accomplished, I am aware that different people think in different ways, so these tips might be very helpful for someone or totally useless for others! I think that everyone should find his/her way of managing the cleaning-organizing process.
-make a list of all the tasks that you want to accomplish, even the smaller ones, in this way you won`t forget them, you will have a plan of what to clean next and you will feel very accomplished once you check out a task after finishing it, very satisfying! Remember to write smaller tasks, like `clean the kitchen counters` or `empty the junk drawer`, instead of `clean and declutter the whole kitchen` in this way you know exactly what you have to do and you will not feel discouraged if a project seems to big
-Clear all the surfaces in your home, especially the kitchen ones, as much as you can. My friend Rossella gave my this great tip! If we have too much clutter around on the kitchen counters, on the dressers, on the shelves, it makes it way harder to find stuff and to clean those parts of our house. So what I did was getting rid of all the small appliances that I was keeping on the kitchen counters but that I wasn`t using on an everyday basis, this helped a lot because the kitchen counters are cleaner, they look better and less cluttered!
-if you are cleaning a drawer or a cabinet, remember to empty all of it first, in this way you will easily have access to the whole space to clean and then you will be able to put aside all the things that you don`t need anymore and to organize everything again.
-I use two items that help me a lot, the first are drawer dividers because I can create different spaces inside drawers without using containers and without having things shift their places in the drawer every time I open it.
The second is clear plastic containers. I use them a lot, for example in the fridge for yogurts, cheese, ham and small packages that would fall and create a mess otherwise. I also use them in my pantry to keep all the snacks together, or to keep all the cookies that we eat at breakfast together, so in the morning all I have to do is grab the container and put it on the table. I also use them for vitamins and supplements that we take in the morning.
This is it my friends, hopefully you found some interesting, useful tips that will make your decluttering easier next time!
I will meet you here next week, have a great weekend!
Anna