Reboot

Yesterday was an epically successful day. The list of accomplishments included:

• Did all the laundry. Every stitch of clothes, every sheet, every towel. ALL THE LAUNDRY. I don’t even want to tell you how many loads. AND folded it. AND put it away.
• Did all the grocery shopping. We were at the point of having been without bread and milk for several days so you know what that shopping trip looked like. John alone. With all four kids.
• Cleaned the house. Did a Blitz (or, as I prefer to call it, a “reallocation of goods”), and bathrooms, floors, changed sheets, disinfected mattresses, and all the other weekly stuff. ALSO – organized a closet and a desk and rearranged some furniture.
• Did some school.

This is like, 2 weeks worth of accomplishments in my household of many mess-makers and few mess-cleaners. But we did it. We have a fresh start today.
We need a fresh start. This last month and a half I’ve been dragging around here at maybe 50% and this past week sunk down to about 30%. It was just not working. Everything was going to you-know-where and it wasn’t even in a pretty hand basket.
I woke up yesterday feeling like a new woman but then I looked around me and realized that just catching up was going to deplete all my resources. So I came up with the plan. I did a good top to bottom (not including the basement…shudder) clean of the house while my "mother's helper" played with the kids and read books to them.
I loaded up all the dirty clothes from the last 3 weeks (no one had any underwear left. Let alone other clean clothes) and sheets from visitors and sleeping bags that had been peed in and damp towels that had been festering. Try not to imagine the smell. Loaded them up in the van. After work John dropped me off with my laundry, many quarters, Chinese for dinner and he took all the kids to the grocery store with a detailed list. While he was placating them with loads of surgery treats I filled up 1/2 of the washers with our laundry and watched days and days of continuous laundry tasks get accomplished in about 2 hours.
So now, instead of spending all next week getting caught up from my bad month I can just start fresh. Fresh and thankful for a good life. A healthy-ish body, a crazy but enjoyable family, a cozy home, a fridge full of food and a heavy but manageable work load to keep it all going.