Clutter

The magazines I was supposed to read in January are getting a little bossy.  “Lose Your Clutter Now!” they tell me. “Start the New Year Clutter-Free!” “Organize Your Bathroom!”

Really, I feel like the bathroom is the only room I can organize. Perhaps this is helped by the fact that it’s minuscule and I am not super girly, so there are not a lot of products in there. But I do wonder why four people need four different kinds of toothpaste.

But do they need to be so bossy about it? They don’t live here. They don’t know how it is here on the ground.

Ok, I admit, there’s a clutter problem  at the Fun Apartment. But the magazines don’t seem to understand that microapartments are immediately cluttered by the simple proposition of setting down one’s keys or owning possessions. The Fun Apartment is really &%^#ing small. I can clean the place up within the limits of possibility. But then I do something crazy, like get the mail and the whole thing starts all over again.

Also, there never seem to be any kids in the magazines. I mean, even if they have kids, they don’t have real kids. The kind that play with toys. The kind that are a little bit like rock stars at hotels. The kind who consider a day without the lego bins dumped out a day not fully lived.

I might be part of the problem, too. After all, I have a natural inclination to keep stuff I like. And then there’s the Mister, who would prefer that I not mention him in this post, lest the producers of Hoarders be trolling around for material. But really, how many pith helmets does a man need?

Trust me, I’m a believer in the latest home organizing religion: bins. But we’ve run out of shelves for the bins. So the bins just float around like lifeboats for the couch.

More bins! Different bins! Lots more bins! Well, eventually one reaches a point where one believes that this is all just some Container Store shakedown. Also, I haven’t really seen a bin in the shape of a rocking giraffe, or an old typewriter, or a basketball hoop. I think they’re missing an opportunity there.

But the magazines of January make one quite purge-ish (in non-eating disorder and non-Stalinist ways). So we’re condensing the whole Pandora’s Unit of our storage situation. Countless hours of fun, I assure you.

But I might have discovered a solution to keeping the Fun Apartment clutter-free.

I’m sure Mommy will be back any minute now. . . .

But it wouldn’t be fun anymore.

So, Clutter, it looks like you’ll be sticking around a while. Make yourself at home.

But, as one reader suggested, I am going to get rid of the magazines.

Hey, thanks!

Now that the rest of the world has moved on to some new holiday, I thought I’d reflect on the last one, because I come late to every party.

Here’s how we celebrate Thanksgiving at the Fun Apartment:

I better get a rake. . . .

Throughout November, every night at dinner. we each say what we’re thankful for that day, and write it on a leaf. So the tree starts out bare and ends up full of happy-thanky little leaves. It’s like watching Fall happen in reverse. I’m not sure where I got the idea, but I probably stole it from a magazine.

And it’s kinda fun! When we started, the oldest could barely articulate his thanks, and I think his leaves usually featured “Mommy” or “Cake.” But now he can write his own thanks, complete with illustration! And I do think he (mostly) grasps the concept of being thankful, even if he isn’t thankful for the usual suspects (Quick Poll: is anyone else in the world thankful for shipwrecks? Just checking. . . .)

Our younger fellow is now in the early stages. Most of his leaves maintain that he is thankful for “Lightning McQueen” or some other inane thing for which I am decidedly unthankful. But we’re getting there.

And it does help, after a wretched day of whining or after-school meltdowns, to pretend to be thankful for something. Because, usually it leads to being actually thankful. And if not, hey, fake it til you make it.

So, did we host a 14 person dinner here at the Fun Apartment? Not with our four chairs we didn’t. Instead, we joined some family upstate in a rambling house that slept all fourteen comfortably. It was like a wonderful dream! There was turkey! There was a fireplace! There was wine! There was snow! There were leftovers! There were games! There was more wine! It was a very “It takes a village” situation, because every time my kids wandered into the kitchen, someone fed them. And one day we all stayed in our jammies until nightfall, when we went out sledding. That may have been one of the best days ever.

The house was so big that I sometimes went hours without seeing my kids. They were content to play with their cousins, and seemed to never know boredom. It was brilliant, but I also kind of missed them. And by the end of the weekend, they were kind of falling apart. It was as if so much freedom made them dizzy. Despite all the tremendous good times, I think we were all kind of glad to be snuggled up together back here.

So, as always, I am thankful for the Fun Apartment.