Chapter 2 Application:

Restoring Order in your Home

Hey Mama, Do you feel like chaos follows you around? Do you struggle to find rest for your weary soul? Are you searching for any place to feel like a respit or retreat? A personal Sanctuary? 

There is a way to bring order to the chaos and it begins in your home

An Excerpt from Chapter 2: 

      " If your goal for picking up this book was to feel something new, to feel a hope and refreshment for your soul, bringing some order into your home and routine is a great place to start. Have you ever met a person that says, “ I just hate when my house is clean,” or “I can’t stand walking into an organized closet.”

     But so many people, myself included, use the excuse that we don’t have time for that. The reality is, we all have the same time in a day but we get caught up letting our circumstances dictate and derail how we use it. Creating a routine of just a few tasks you complete each day can stop the madness of things piling up and it feeling like you have to take a whole day to clean your house. The people that I know with the tidiest houses are some of the busiest working mamas I know. They don’t spend hours of a day or a whole day a week deep cleaning, just a few minutes of each day keep things clean and easy to maintain.

     Whether you implement all of the following, or just a few, I’m confident you can find this brings you some balance to your crazy, chaotic and precious life so that you can enjoy living more of it in the moment rather than watching it pass you by from your kitchen sink or laundry room after a long day at work. So here are a few of my favorite tips for tackling your home front:"

Tips to bring Order in the Chaos

Chapter 2 gives you page after page of practical tips you can apply to change your routine, restore order in your home and help you create a place that is your sanctuary. Maybe you're not a neat freak and you Iive by the saying, "life is too short for a clean house". Well there's some truth, but chances are there is a little piece of order that can be restored that can help you feel like you clean less and live more. A few of my favorite tips from this chapter are:

1. Make your bed. Everyday. You are no longer a kid, you are an adult that deserves to get into a made bed at the end of the day. If this task takes you too long, simplify. Get rid of the throw pillows no one sees and you never put back on the bed anyway. Reduce to one quilt, lose the top sheet and it will take you less than 30 seconds to pull it all together in the morning. Try it for 30 days and then tell me it doesn't make you want to walk in your room more and a get you a little more eager to crawl in at the end of the day! Tag your made bed on social media, @fortheworkingmama!
2. Clean up after your kids, everyday if you can. “Shouldn’t the kids clean up their own mess?” Well mamas, remember this truth: “Train up a child the way he should grow and when he is old he will not depart from it,” Proverbs 22:6.. I don’t allow my kids to just sit by and watch me clean up their mess, if they are home I engage them in the clean up so that they can learn how to put things away. Starting fresh with a clean space each day does something for their creativity and it makes it so much easier on mama than getting to that playroom or their rooms once every couple of weeks when everything has found its way to a pile on the floor. 
3. Don't spend your weekends on the minutia. Many of us live for the weekend, Monday through Friday feels like a race to the finish line. Then Saturday (oh, glorious Saturday) rolls around and we've got so many things we think we need to do. STOP! Now! Your weekends do not need to be this way. There are so many things you can do throughout the week to prep for the weekend so that you can kick your feet up and rest. After six days of work, even the God of the universe rested. So don't feel guilty about an afternoon of napping on the couch by Sunday, that's what its made for. For all the steps to getting your weekend back, read through Chapter 2. 
4. Simplify your mornings. There are far too many mornings to count that I would finally strap in to the driver’s seat, my blood pressure off the charts. By that point, I’ve yelled at at least one human, two dogs, and sometimes tears were involved, often my own. This is no way to start your day. It sounds dramatic but it’s for real. So, I found a new way to do this. I showered at night, invested in some top notch Drybar dry shampoo to look fresh in the morning, shrank my morning to-do list to: dress, eat, coffee, devotion, and took all the other pressure off to do anything else. My kids eat dry cereal in a ziplock baggie or toaster waffle on the drive in to school, we pray for their day in the carline, and off they go. They don’t miss the hot breakfast buffet they never had. I will not feel guilty for that, and neither should you!
5. Declutter your space so that you can fill it with things you actually love.Stop right now if you are home, wherever you are in your home. Look around you, take in all of the "stuff" that you have on shelves, hanging on walls, stacked on tables, shoved in baskets, partially hidden under your bed. How much of that stuff actually brings you some kind of joy? Is it there because someone gave it to you? Is it hanging on your wall because it was on clearance and it was just ok but something that would fill up your space? I had so much of that. Some of it I actually began to hate overtime. I got so sick of looking at it. So one day I took a box, I walked around the house and I just took it off and put it in the box. So what if the space is blank for a while, move something you love to that spot. Or take time to find the right thing not just something that was on clearance. So what if it doesn't match or nobody gets it! Who lives in this house anyway? You cannot fill your space with the things that bring you joy if it is so covered in things that are space filler. 

There are may more tips and tricks to complete the process of bringing order to your mind and space, these were just my top 5. Dive into Chapter 2 for the full list and decide for yourself which you will apply today. What good is a practical application if you never go as far as to apply it. So pick just one, or five and start applying. Share it with me, I'd love to hear how it worked for you! 

"After you’ve taken an inventory of your home, done the de-clutter to rid your space of the things that are negative filler, taking up space and brining you no joy; begin to fill the emptiness with things you love. Some of the loves of my home are things gifted to me by people I love. My sweet friend Connie has passed down some of my favorite treasures. My Grandma Lois left me two of my absolute favorite paintings. My kids made these little ceramic turkeys that I leave out all year round because I just love them so much, it doesn’t even matter that its not Thanksgiving." -Chapter 2: The Homefront: Lessons I Learned From My Mama