mission accomplished

last week was not such a great one. The girls had three days of ITBS testing, we spent hours getting new glasses for me (have I mentioned that I can now SEE?), and work was a little bit on the stressful side. I had hopes of getting away to go camping with Evie, but because of the forecasted rain, we decided to stay put.

as we have now entered the month of March, I figured we should put our weekend at home to good use and complete the [/caption]

But, we managed to tackle it with not a single breakdown. (Chloe did have one minor outburst when Rob tried to help her make her bed with the freshly washed linens.) And Chloe did much more of it on her own without my help than ever before. I think we may have turned a corner!

I made a few minor adjustments to the process. For one, I kept up with the piles heading out. Sometimes the “trash” and “Goodwill” piles can become overwhelming, so I made frequent trips to carry stuff down to the basement.

Sorting out the dresser drawers

Another adjustment I made was to change how we handled the treasures. I found a bunch of empty bags, and every time we found something that didn’t have an obvious place, it went into a bag. Every time we filled a bag, it got moved out to the playroom. This temporary displacement let us concentrate on the task at hand (dresser, closet, bookshelf, etc.) without distraction. It also kept the “I don’t know” pile from getting in our way while cleaning the room. Once the room was clean, we dumped the bags out in the playroom and sorted these orphans into “trash”, “Goodwill” and “Keep” piles. Then the keep pile got sorted into “Chloe’s room” and “elsewhere”. The elsewhere stuff got put away, then the “Chloe’s room” pile was sorted into categories such as “hair things”, “jewelry”, “coins”, “stones” and so on. This new sorting algorithm seemed to work quite well and keep us all from becoming overwhelmed.

Treasures almost all sorted

We have a few things left to sort and clean, but for the most part, it is DONE! Now, is it too much to hope that it will stay clean and organized ??