Buy Time for Yourself and Delegate for Gods Sake!

Visions of my great grandmother's life on the farm in North Dakota, brought me to one of my first considerations about organization. Back in the day, parents had a boat load of kids because they needed  legal slave labor. Somewhere along the way, parents bestowed a sense of entitlement on our modern-day child freeing them to a life consumed by TV, computers and video games. Time for our robust little glazed-eyed spawn to get a taste of the good 'ole days. Ok, so that vision was a little harsh, but for many Americans, not totally off the mark.

The truth of the matter is that our kiddos get very little "screen time" and do their fair share of imaginative play when they aren't playing in the sand box or pool with their friends. Still, I can't deny that my 4-year-old was getting pretty comfortable with the served life and needed to take on some household responsibilities.

I decided that since Simmy, my 4-year-old, doesn't really have a concept of time, any chores that were given needed to be daily tasks, and for consistency reasons they needed to happen at the same time each day. He also needed an all-or-nothing monetary reward for his efforts.

Here's a shot of the chart that I created for him.

I paid him $1 a week for his chores. As you can imagine, I immediately became Mama Nag to Simmy. He reluctantly completed each chore in order to get his $1 pay out Sunday night. Still, the constant prodding on my part wasn't really saving me any time. A daily 25 cent bonus payout was needed to kick start a habit of doing chores without being told. This adjustment worked famously. Many a morning, while C.C. and I are still nestled in bed, we are woken to the rustling of little Simmy dressing, cleaning his room, making his bed and clunking his large rolling laundry basket down the stairs into the laundry room. I don't plan on correcting the laundry basket issue. This has evoked a new and necessary habit in C.C., Baby Pai and myself of waking up bright and early.

Step 1: A Clean Kitchen

Remember college? It was cool to have a messy bed, clothes strewn about your bedroom floor and mac 'n' cheese for dinner. Veggies and fruit were replaced by beer, and the freshman 15 were to be expected and welcome to stick around for a few years. Ahh, I think I was in my organized prime in college.

Captain Chaos shares my innate tendencies for frat living. Sorry, fraternity. I'm always being corrected. His quarterly home office clean up is a weekend long-task resulting in an overflowing green waste bin filled with boxes and paper. His behavior is ever similar to the mid-term cram.

Anyway, as I said, it was all good back then but, we're well in to our 30s now, and life is getting too busy and is going too fast to be spending 10 minutes every morning hunting down my keys or battery drained cell phone. I require ORGANIZATION!!

So, where to start you ask? I cleaned my kitchen.

I'm going to be self-righteous for a moment and say that the mama is the heart of her family. She keeps a family moving forward with meal planning, cooking, cleaning, laundry, event planning, trip planning and tons of other stuff. For me, C.C. (short for Captain Chaos) is a really steller dad. He covers a lot of these duties, especially when I go rogue. If I were on my A game all the time, I believe, I would be the heart of our family and my kitchen would be the coronary arteries. I'm not a science girl, so I'll kill my big anatomy vocab now.

The kitchen is where food is stored, meals are prepared, served and enjoyed. It's the natural social gathering place for us when it's just the fam hanging out or when we have guests over. I decided that if I start my organizational journey with cleaning the kitchen, I would feel good about organizing other areas of my life too.

I decided that no matter how chaotic every other fasces of my life is, the kitchen always had to remain clean. Gotta start somewhere.