THIS JUST IN…
Hey TeamC — exciting news!
I was just asked to speak at the monthly
Happiness Club in lovely downtown Madison, CT
If you live in the area, I’d absolutely love to see you there!

Wednesday, June 21st @ 7pm
In the building to the right of the downtown
Madison First Congregational Church
26 Meeting House Lane

TeamC, I feel like I took you with me on the great clean out of 2017, right? You remember the time…Six years ago, Marie Kondo waltzed into my life like a tiny Japanese angel. She told me to focus on what I wanted to keep rather than what I wanted to get rid of, and it blew my friggin’ mind. I then proceeded to rip through my house all day and night on what looked like a mission to cure collateral kid-clutter disease. It was insane, but it was beautiful. The problem is, TeamConfessioners, that was a long time ago and things have gotten a little out of hand here over the past six years. Did someone say, “It’s time for a P-L-A-N”?

One of my favorite ways to tackle anything in our home is to do what I call, “The Room by Room.” When we first bought 136, every time I tried to get things for the house, I couldn’t focus because I was considering every single room in the house at once. Then I decided to put my attention on one room at a time. The Plan this summer is to list the most problematic areas in the house and move from the top to the bottom of that list. What I get to, I get to—no pressure.

While this strategy could require some hard work, it honestly feels like a self-care mission. If I don’t have some structure, a glorious summer day can quickly become a 10-episode bige-party. While that’s fine occasionally, a binge party doesn’t make me happy if I do it frequently. Decluttering, on the other hand, makes me SO HAPPY. In other words, I’m doing this for myself, not to myself.

Here are a few ways I can make streamlining my house even more fun and manageable:

1. 1. Chatting on the phone or with someone in-person always seems to make a big project more manable.
   2. Bringing bins of clutter into the living room at night, or on a rainy day, and organizing in front of my favorite, crappy Netflix shows makes those binge-parties actually productive.
   3. And lastly, my favorite: listening to an audio book or podcast, which makes time absolutely fly!

The other great part of my decluttering plan is that it’s a plan that I can completely let go of. If I can resurface in the fall with some trips to Goodwill under my belt, I know I’ll feel lighter and things will run a bit smoother in September. If that doesn’t happen, you’ll never catch me saying, “We had an amazing summer, but I wish I spent more time cleaning.”

Next week, I want to strategize planning for kids in the summer. We can chat about another mistake I was making that I’m hoping to mend this time around, until then…