I found an organizing book I LOVE!  I took it out of the library to avoid adding clutter to my home, but it’s so good that I might end up with a kindle version to keep as a reference.

The book is called “One Year To An Organized Life” by Regina Leeds, a professional organizer who has been helping people in Los Angeles for over twenty years.

The book gives you a project a week to work on for an entire year, with the goal being that at the end of the year you will have a completely organized, clutter free home from top to bottom – and new habits that help it STAY that way.

It’s phenomenal, because every week is small enough to be do-able, but big enough to be significant… and it all adds up.

Even if you decide not to embark on a year long organizing journey, by flipping to the week or weeks where she outlines all the steps to organize the section of your home that you’d like to work on, you’ll have a detailed plan from an expert on how to get your space organized.

She gives great pointers for every section of the house about how to decide what you should keep and how you should organize it.

Take the kitchen – she has two paragraphs on what you should keep in your junk drawer, and some suggestions for keeping other things out of it.  She suggests where to put kitchen utensils and items based on where you do food prep, so your items are better at hand.  She gives you pointers for where to start the organization process (by purging and inventorying) and what to do next.

The book is interspersed with little anecdotes about clients that she’s had that illustrate different points, such as the client who unwittingly became a teddy bear collector because people kept gifting them to her although she never intended to start a collection.  The grandmother who still had boxes of clothes from high school that would never fit her again but reminded her of her youth (take a photo, donate them to a better home!).

The minutiae of the advice in the book is extremely impressive.  When you’re into a specific project, she’s got suggestions for how to label bill folders in your filing cabinet, how to make decisions about which toys to keep for your children and which to donate or store for grandchildren, and how to organize your digital photos.  She even has sections devoted to being better organized around the holidays and when you’re traveling.  It’s amazing.

Armed with her detailed suggestions for how to proceed, and two kids who are very interested in helping, it’s time to take on our pantry.  Expired food, goodbye.  It’s time to inventory what I have, get rid of food we can’t or won’t eat, and start buying more mindfully and deliberately in the future.

Looks like we’re having amaranth for dinner tonight.  (Huh?  What?  Why did I think I could figure out what to do with it and buy it with no recipe, plan, or complementary ingredients?!?!)

I have a babysitter this morning so I can go for a tempo run… but my legs hurt and it’s pouring out, and quite honestly I’m not feeling like doing much of anything.  Mornings like that I try to figure out what I could do NOW that will make things better for myself LATER.  If I’m in a bad mood, I might as well fold laundry or meal plan or run errands, rather than doing those things when I’m in a good mood and might be able to laugh while I’m hanging out with the kids in the rain, stomping in puddles, instead of morosely waiting for the clouds to clear.

So I made phone calls, ran errands, and ended at the library where I could grab some resources for some things I’d like to focus on in the upcoming weeks.

Last night I watched this five minute Ted Talk, and it reminded me yet again how much I wish I weren’t surrounded by so much STUFF.

Time to Declutter and Minimalize. 

Most of the toys in the house are currently stored in giant, unsorted boxes, rendering them unusable because you only have 30% of the shapes to sort or fifty percent of the tinker toys.

Fifty percent of my closet doesn’t fit me, and 90% of Andrew’s closet doesn’t fit HIM.

I can’t open my car door in the garage without hitting a bicycle or scooter.

We have so many stuffed animals that I could open a store (except that you can barely even donate used stuffed animals, let alone sell them.)

I have more stuffed elephants in this house than children.  I have more stuffed teddy bears than children, nieces and nephews.  I have enough stuffed bunnies to host an Easter brunch and gift a stuffed bunny to every child in Andrew’s playgroup.

My pantry is shoved full of expired food… including Hershey’s chocolate bars that expired in 2011.  We don’t even eat milk chocolate anymore.

I’m wasting money buying things that we probably already own, wasting time looking for things because I can’t find them in all the clutter, and losing my sanity because I’m surrounded by clutter, and guilt about the environmental impact of owning SO. MUCH STUFF.  Even as I’m driven to buy more things because I wasn’t mindful about the things I originally purchased and now want different things.

I’m losing my mind.

Time to be proactive – I took out some library books with organizing and decluttering tips from the experts, and I’m going to be buying things mindfully from now on.

If I don’t love it, I’m NOT buying it… I don’t care how on sale it is.

I will beg relatives to give my children museum passes and tickets to events and special outings for holidays, and I will donate or sell things that my children no longer use (except the few that should be saved for grand children because they were truly special).

I will take things to the re-usables section at the town dump.  I will sell my high-end shoes that no longer fit post-pregnancy through consignment, finding them a new home and saving someone else money.  I will use my library and my kindle.  I will recycle my newspapers and think hard before renewing my magazine subscriptions.

I will only buy groceries that I have a plan for, and I will check my pantry before I shop.

I can get this more under control… right?

 

Running changed my life profoundly for the better, and helped me understand how profoundly our lives can change when we take a time-out to evaluate the way we’re living.  I like to regularly re-evaluate how life is going… are we stuck in our ways, leading unimaginative lives, not taking the time to look around us with fresh eyes at areas where we could improve our health, our environmental impact, our quality of life?

It took hitting rock bottom after my second son was born for me to start exercising regularly, and seeing the positive changes running has made in my energy, mood, and overall well-being makes me want to seek out other ways I can change our lives for the better.

The more I become interested in doing things that are healthy for my family AND the planet, the more I realize I need to start tackling some of the toxins in our home. My interest peaked when I recently discovered a book called Little Changes, by Kristi Marsh of choosewiser.com.

For Kristi, breast cancer rather than running was the start of a journey for change in her home. Surviving cancer sparked an interest in wellness that had her looking through her cosmetics cabinet, refrigerator, and under the sink with greater scrutiny. Not only did she want to remain cancer free, she wanted to reduce the risk of her children ever experiencing the pain, suffering, and potential loss of life she’d been through. When she started learning about everything from pesticides, GMO’s, and endocrine disruptors to known carcinogens in her mascara and nail polishes, Kristi quickly realized that she needed to start changing her purchasing habits and choose wiser, for the sake of her family’s health and the health of the planet.

Her book is such a REAL journey, of a REAL mom, out there learning piece by piece about the chemicals we eat and breathe and absorb through our skins… and how little we know about their safety. Europe has banned over a thousand more chemicals from cosmetics and personal care products than we have in the United States – chemicals that scientists and political advisors in Europe believe are dangerous enough not to risk the health of their citizens when there are safer alternatives available. It’s not about going without, it’s about choosing differently – and that doesn’t even have to mean more expensive. (I saved $10 a bottle when I switched from my chemical-laden toner to a bottle of aloe and lavender witch hazel.)

I admire Kristi greatly, because rather than becoming disheartened by the highly unregulated chemical world around us, she started to carefully make one change at a time in her home. She replaced makeup products with safer versions and started using less. She mixed her own household cleaners, saving bucket-loads of money and discovering how effective the white vinegar (the smell dissipates, she promises) and baking soda are at making safe household cleaners. She switched to organic produce, joined a CSA, saved money to put towards organics by buying less meat. Whether you want to make a few of the same choices or many, this is a book that helps parents see the importance of making better choices, and how to do it. I expected to feel disheartened at the end, but Kristi included so much information, and so many resources, and so many tips on where and how to start to make little changes that I felt inspired and ready to be proactive.

Reading her book, and following her footsteps on her journey to make better, more educated choices about all the products she buys, was such an inspiration – because I CAN DO THAT.

I can buy better toothpaste when mine runs out. I can take ten minutes and look up cosmetics on www.ewg.org/skindeep/ to find a safe option before I buy my next mascara and lipstick. I can even use the products I have rather than wasting them, and just make sure no more carcinogens or dangerous toxins enter my home when I buy replacements.

Not only CAN I do it, I WILL do it… and now that I know how dangerous some of the things in my house are, I’m grateful that there are resources like choosewiser.com and The Campaign for Safe Cosmetics out there forging the way for me so I don’t have to get a degree in chemistry to keep my family safe.

I used to think the cosmetics industry and government would make sure that products my family used were safe… no one would put chemicals known to be harmful in their products and sell them to children, right?  Unfortunately, corporations have a lot of pressure to make profits and please their stock-holders.  If a chemical is beginning to be recognized as unsafe by the scientific community, that’s not enough for a profit-seeking company to start phasing it out – especially when their competition is still using it.  BPA was known by the scientific community to be harmful long before companies started phasing it out… and it’s still used in can linings and plastics, even though we know how dangerous it is.  It’s up to us as consumers to ask companies for change, to stop buying products we know to be unsafe, and to encourage our government to increase legislation that keeps unsafe ingredients out of our products.

I know that there are people who use these products for years and don’t get cancer. I know that some of them are “correlated” to higher cancer rates which might not mean they “cause” cancer. I also know that I am not going to be the guinea pig who finds out in twenty years that correlation WAS causation, not when there are safer, healthier alternatives at similar price points available. Not when it’s not just what I’m putting on my skin, but what I’m putting on my children’s skin, and that’s then being washed out into the waterways and our world for the oceans to deal with.

No. No. No.

It’s not necessary. It’s not better. It’s not good for my skin, it’s not even more effective, it’s not even less expensive. Give me the product with the slightly shorter shelf life that doesn’t smell as strong, and let’s save the oceans and reduce our risk of cancer, and maybe even feel healthier and better in the short term, too.

Thanks Kristi – your book has fueled a spark with me, and I’m honored to join you on your journey.