Get in the zone!

Ack! There is only one week until summer is over!!!! How did this happen people!?  Seriously had a mini-panic attack the other day as I realized this! I know, the denial hanging above my head had been a heavy heavy fog! You remember me last summer when I was like Super Mom on maternity leave with crafts and projects and games galore.  Check out my series of posts from last summer here, I rather impressed myself last summer.  This summer was the exact opposite of that.  Ha! Go out and play. No you don’t need a snack and I won’t make you one.  No we cannot go anywhere.  Yes I do hate fun.  I felt like a lame mom this summer and yes I realize it was my own stinking fault.  After last year, I had nowhere to go but down.  But we survived, we did some cool stuff. Heck we went on two vacations in July and one of them was to the Bahamas!  But how can it be over!!! I’m not ready!  I like routines and structure and schedule so to me “Back To School” is quite honestly music to my ears. But. Oh. My. Word. My house! It is filthy and disorganized and all the 7.4 billion projects I was going to get done this summer, or rather have my husband get done, did indeed NOT get done and for the love of all that is holy WE NEED MORE TIME!!!!! To be fair to him he built me a magnificent deck that trumps any and all item on his Honey-do list.  However with the new school year closing in on us this was what my mind was racing with.  

But I, dear friends, am an amazing procrastinator.  If you need someone to waste time with you and then in the 11^th hour pull out razor sharp focus and determination and pull off a giant project like a boss…I’m your girl! So I looked at “last week of summer vacation” and I stood my ground and I said “Game on!” Here is my strategy feel free to join in, you have 6 days. (I had 9 woo hoo!)

Only 9 days left, what are we going to do?  Step 1: Have a fun day (What!? I thought you meant business?) We have a reusable summer bucket list and the summer fun items are all listed on popsicle sticks in the bucket.  Saturday we dumped all the sticks on the floor and went through them all to see how many activities we could cram into one day! In the end I think we accomplished about 12 list items and had a great time! Boom.  

Step 2. Separate your house into zones.  How many days till school = how many zones you have.  I had 9 zones.  With each zone you clean, organize and purge the area.  You are also doing a deeper cleaning than usually occurs.  The children WILL BE helping with this process.  Put them to work!!! Oh they will whine and complain and claim they didn’t make the mess (which is categorically untrue!) but working is good for their souls.  It’s good for who they will become. Make them work.  God bless my kids I don’t think I make them work enough.  

So zone 1 for us was the garage, because you guys, I can’t walk from my car to my house without looking like a bank robber trying to sneak through a minefield of laser alarms.   So what did we do to clean and organize the garage?  You better believe I had them all drag every single item from the garage to the driveway.  People kept slowing down to see if they wanted anything from our yard sale! Take it!!! Ha-ha! Tempting.  Grace informed me with an eye roll that this was all “So embarrassing!” (Will someone please tell my child she is NOT a teenager yet?) We put stuff back into the garage carefully and thoughtfully.  We came up with a short list of a few inexpensive projects Craig can do in the future to further organize.  That is a very important element of this process, planning long term.  Love for procrastination aside this is the penalty, not having time/ability to make major transformations.  But having a plan in place for them feels like a step in the right direction.  

Today we did zone 2, the mudroom/bathroom/kitchen.  Ok seriously I need to know someone else’s kitchen is as out of control as mine!? I had kids washing the slider and cleaning the baseboards and wiping down the crown molding on the cupboards.  It was awesome.  Many times my kids would say “this is too hard!” oh how they didn’t want to clean.  But they all chipped in to make the messes, they are helping to fix the situation.  I also reassured them that the kitchen is the worst room in terms of dirt so it should be all downhill from here.  

So we have seven more days and seven more zones.  I’m full of goals.  Having a plan made it seem much more doable.  Rather than convincing myself there wasn’t enough time and blowing it off due to the lack of time to invest I broke it down and made it manageable.  I am all about goals lately, you feel accomplished when you can cross them off, I’m kind of addicted to that feeling.  The keys to success are you want the zone to feel like it is getting a fresh start and you want to tackle the big scary jobs that get ignored all year because they seem too hard or gross.  For example my hubby scrubbed out the gross cupboard under our kitchen sink where the trash lives. (Is your cupboard under there kinda gross too? Please say yes!)  It looks as beautiful as the day we moved in! We are both feeling whipped tonight, and we have seven more zones to do! But step 3 is crucial to the goal; Rewards!!! We have been rewarding the kids for their efforts by doing a few more surprise items from the bucket list too! Tonight we went to Hagar Park for the playground, trail hike and ended with ice cream.  So I guess I don’t completely hate fun, kids!  Tune in next week and I’ll show you all the rest of the zones/transformations.  What is everyone else doing to get ready for back to school?