Is a Little Organization Too Much To Ask?

My house is out of control. I've written about it many times and while sometimes you just have to let it go, other times you have to rent a large dumpster.

I live in a house of 7 people and only one cares about how this house looks. It doesn't take a genius to figure out who that one is. I do have one thing on my side: I'm the boss so if I say clean, they have to clean. In theory anyway.

On Friday I told Ross that he, Trace and I were going to clean out the garage on Saturday. We have a 3 car garage and only one car can fit in it. I thought I was being really nice about it. I was up by 8:30 but I let them sleep in and we started after lunch. See, I was nice.

Saturday afternoon, shortly after noon the boys emerged from the basement looking for food, just like bears who have awoken from a long winter's hibernation.

"Oh good, you're up. Time to work!" I announced cheerfully. Anything bad sounds better when its said cheerfully.

Trace was confused and then irritated. No one had informed him that we were working.

"Well now you know! We're starting in 15 minutes!" Cheerful, cheerful.

I was met with grumbling but in 15 minutes I had 2 boys standing in the garage with me.

Standing in front of this mess they asked what were they supposed to clean? All righty then. I guess we have a long afternoon ahead of us. I ended up having to specifically say things like "Take this box marked 'garage tools', unpack it and put the tools with the other tools."

Every 5 minutes or so Trace would ask "Are we done yet?" when the garage still looked like it does above. Finally I looked at Trace and cheerfully said "Plan on being here at least an hour so you might as well stop asking."

I know my son. His plan was to wear me down until I finally released him. Not happening today mister. I was a woman on a mission.

There were a couple of pieces of furniture in the garage that I decided to move into the house. This caused a dilemma for the boys. There were spiders in the garage and spider webs on the furniture. Somehow both of my boys are terrified of spiders. This necessitated the vacuum cleaner being called into action. That vacuum has seen a lot of bugs lately.

The vacuuming of this table is obviously a 2 person job. Doesn't if just remind you of a scene from Top Gun? Trace is Maverick with the vacuum hose and Ross is Goose. No? Maybe the heat was getting to me. But hey, they were going to have to touch the table to bring it into the house so they had to make extra sure there wasn't a spider under there waiting to pounce on them as they carried it up the stairs.

I found a box of photos and took it in the house and discovered this when I came back out:

Junk? What stuff all over the driveway? Let's play a game of football. Back to work boys!

The thing I love about my boys is that separately they are funny but together they are hilarious. Even though we worked hard (when I pulled out the whip) we had a fun afternoon.

Ross practicing his "Blue Steel" move and look from Zoolander. No wonder he was voted Best Looking by the yearbook staff at his new school.

Have you noticed these boys don't have shirts on? You just never know when a cute girl might drive by. On a cul-de-sac. Full of young children. You just never know.

About 3 hours later we finished and we can now fit TWO cars in the garage and you can even walk into the third bay.

Looking good! But now I was inspired. I decided to tackle the inside on Sunday. The boys were off the hook and this time the girls were called into action.

It didn't matter how cheerfully I said "Today we're going to go through all the toys in the living room and playroom and sort them and put them away." It just didn't seem to be received well. Good thing I'm immune to whining.

We started downstairs and took a whole laundry basket upstairs to the playroom. The rest of the toys downstairs were put in a basket by the fireplace. But the downstairs was the easy part.

The upstairs was a mess although it didn't look this bad when we started. We were going through everything. It didn't help matters that Ryan and Emma were "helping."

I decided to take a break and crack my whip from a chair. I was pointing to which basket Jenna needed to put a toy in. Yes, that's a Vente Iced Non-Fat, No Whip Mocha from Starbucks. And no I didn't go get it. Ross was enabling me brought it to me.

The table in the garage that the boys had vacuumed has baskets underneath so we used it to help organize toys.

The play room last night after the children went to bed. How lovely. Just don't look at the rest of my house!