The Shuffle

I'm doing the shuffle. Not the dance from the 1970s. I'm talking about the crap shuffle. We have so much stuff, so much crap (all of it very valuable, of course) and such a little house, that there is no place to sit or walk safely. Our living room also acts as a dining room, tv room, and play room. Oh, and office, library, and craft room. All day long I move stuff out of our way so we can eat, so we can play, so we can sit on the couch or on Joey's cool "tummy time" blanket our friends Lara & Brenda gave us (from Ikea, naturally). There's no place to build blocks unless we move Joey's blanket and bouncy seat. There's no place to eat unless we move the mail and grocery list and phone and keys and hat and drawing. There's no place to color unless we move puzzles and motors and rubber stamps. There's no place to put a cup of coffee unless we move more crap. Then it spills on the already-stained rug. Ugh.

Too much stuff. We should be on the show "Hoarders". Except I just keep thinking that once we move to a bigger house, the crap will have specific places and we will have a kitchen, a dining room, a living room, a family room, a play room, an office. Each of us will have our own bedroom, so the baby's dresser won't be next to mine, so the paperwork to be filed won't be on the floor in front of my dresser so high that I cannot get into the bottom two drawers.

No one I know lives like this. When friends come over (and they rarely do any more, since I'm so embarrased about our clutter), I do the shuffle. I take the junk off the mantel, off the dining table, off the sofa, and I put it all on our bed. I swear that I will put it all away neatly after everyone leaves, before bedtime. But then I am too tired and I place it carefully on the floor until tomorrow. When tomorrow comes, I have 100 other stashes of stuff to deal with, so the piles I moved to our room will stay there for at least a month.

Ugh Ugh Ugh. I used to make fun of people like me (like my parents, my brothers, my sister). Now I am one of those people. Slobs. Lazy. Messy. Yuck. I must change my ways so that my boys don't become like my husband and me. Poor little lambs. With the parents they were given, they don't stand a chance!