No Mess November

What is No Mess November? I am so glad you asked! It's a chance to re-center yourself, re-energize, refresh yourself before (hopefully) the onslaught of winter holidays and prepare for the new year! It's about cutting out the mess, whether that be literal, like taking the trash to the curb every time, or the more metaphorical mess. Like not wading into a political argument with your bully of an uncle at Thanksgiving.

Myself, I am doing one thing a day at work and at home to either literally clean up my mess or metaphorically do it. That's my goal, just ONE thing a day. Yesterday I got a second wind at work and took care of a phone call I had been dreading making. As it usually goes I had built this up into a much bigger deal than it actually was. I also took a few extra minutes and cleared off my desk and emptied my wastepaper basket.

When I got home I made that one pan chicken dish and while it cooked I unloaded and re-loaded the dishwasher. After my dinner was out of the oven I kept the oven on and roasted a whole pan of Brussels Sprouts and onions so that they could cook while we ate dinner. While the sprouts cooled I helped my little one with Math, which would try the patience of a saint. She's ADHD and I am just ADD. So here I am trying to pay attention for the both of us and she's bouncing across the room and attempting a half-gainer off the end of the couch. I put the sprouts in a storage container and put them in the fridge, got the last of the dishes into the dishwasher and hit start. Then I went to bed.

That sounds like a cozy domestic scene, yeah? Not so much really. There's laundry that's been chilling on the couch for so long, at this point it's become a member of the family. The dining room table is covered in random detritus from where a shelf came down last week and left me no place to put my assorted cookware. I had to feed the kids at a makeshift "coffee table" I put up in the living room. My husband had a blinding headache and wasn't his usual ultra helpful self. My dog was ignoring her kibble and jumping from child to child trying to make them spill some precious, precious chicken.

So, my life, is kind of a glorious mess. No Mess November is about taking a moment to make things a little bit cleaner, a little bit calmer and a little bit kinder every day.

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