An Intentional Home in 2020
The first day of the new year brimming with opportunity and HOPE! And yet you might look around your house and see dishes piled from the new year festivities, closets overflowing after the deluge of Christmas gifts, and half of your decorations put away while the other half is waiting to be dismantled.
You might have even taken down your command hooks holding up garland only to find you peeled the paint so now have to touch it up, and while the paint is out you think “I should just go ahead and do the whole house.” It feels a lot like the typical mounting to do list, but “I have such high hopes this year?!” starts to play in your head. When hopes seem like they don’t align with reality, shift your reality, don’t dumb down your hopes (this coming from someone who gets it).
Our homes can either be a place of rest and connection or chaos and isolation. That sounds stark, but think about those days you are washing and folding all the laundry, cleaning up the kitchen, putting away kid stuff, fill in the blank….do you feel connected or isolated? Do you have joy in taking care of your home or is it out of obligation and necessity? Are you thriving through the mundane or waiting for mommy wine o’clock?
One of my favorite verses is Proverbs 14:1 “The wise woman builds up her house, the foolish tear it down with their own hands.”
That’s convicting while at the same time makes me realize we have to stop shooting ourselves in the foot and set the stage for our own success. Building up our home and stewarding it in joy and love is a choice in habits, not a lucky fleeting moment we catch. Here are a few things that have helped us tremendously over the past year to cultivate calm and connectivity.
Implement a plan to monitor information coming in your home. Junk mail, magazines, bills, school paperwork, school art, school sign up sheets, school “__________”, library books, it goes on and on. Look at the main things that cause clutter and think through a plan to meet them head on, then when they come spilling through your doors implement that plan. For us, our office sits at the front of the house so when we check the mail we take it in the office and sort it immediately. School art - Friday’s we go through their school folders together so I can hear them tell me all about what they’ve learned. I save what they are most excited about and the rest? Unless it’s monumentally awesome I give myself permission to throw it away. I know you just cringed, but I didn’t because there are only so many stick pictures I can treasure as progress and only so many blurbs of color I can praise as the next Monet. The point - think about the information coming in and think about how you need to sift through that information to keep the peace without hoarding boxes in the attic.
Another thing that has helped us enormously is meal planning a month at a time. A few days before the month ends, I take about an hour to an hour and a half and plan out the next four weeks of meals. I have a list of about thirty favorite meals so I start by filling in a few of those tried and trues, then build around that. What this has done is allowed us to buy what we can in bulk from Costco and it accounts for those busy weekends when meal planning on the fly doesn’t get done and grocery store runs don’t happen until Monday or Tuesday. No judgement, we’ve been there. Plan ahead, set a timer on your phone to do an Instacart order, then call it a day. There is no glory in shlepping three kids to HEB, telling them to stop asking for brownies and little debbies twenty times, then dropping the milk trying get said kids and groceries in the house. Give yourself grace - feed your people in love, however that needs to happen.
The last big impact for us in ordering the chaos is having a morning and night routine with the kids. Making breakfast casseroles means heating up healthy options is easy and gets the hangry sleepy heads fed before eruptions. Having a clear start to wind down at night (for us it’s bath) helps restless minds and bodies start to settle long before the lights go out. Figure out what works for your family but I promise the impact of reliability in those key times of day will be huge for them.
Whether you relate to these or you have other areas that pull at the threads of your sanity, know that you are not alone. Get a few mama friends together and talk about the areas you need help. They may have awesome input or they may be in the same boat. Vulnerability to be authentic with your home and heart is the only way you move the needle to the home you really want this year. Hint - it’s not about buying a new vintage rug or throw pillow. The home life you want is in the heartbeat of how we handle the mundane.
xoxo
lauren