Changing Rooms

It's half term for Little Z, Big J and I, and as Chris also has a week off work, it's been the ideal opportunity to have lots of family time, which can be difficult when we are all at school or work (or both!).

It has also been a good chance to work together to get the house tidy. I find it hard to get motivated to do it when I am on my own, mainly because I so rarely have time on my own that when I do, I want to use it to sit down with my Kindle.

By yesterday, we had managed to tidy the living room, dining room and the surface in the kitchen which always gets cluttered with bits and pieces that don't seem to belong anywhere and which don't quite make it to the kitchen bits-and-bobs drawer.

We were so pleased with what we had achieved, we went a little crazy and decided to have a go at the conservatory. You have to have have seen our conservatory recently to really appreciate the extent of this job, but when I say we couldn't see the floor, I mean just that.

It had become a dumping ground for my teacher resources (files & folders, loose paperwork, laminates, stationary, photographs, puppets etc.), which occupied the right hand side of the conservatory, not only in approximately 6 boxes stacked up on top of the toy storage unit, but also all over the floor where bags or boxes had split and let paper simply spill out over the carpet.

The other side of the room was filled with toys and clothes the children had grown out of. We had intended to do a car boot sale (not even last Summer, but the one before!), but had never got around to it and so what was neatly arranged bags and boxes, gradually became split bags and torn boxes and 'I don't want to get rid of that' toys were left untidily on the floor after a quick pull-from-the-bottom-of-the-pile-and-play,-while-no-one-is-looking.

We spent all day clearing the conservatory of junk, and although there were some lovely, "hey, come and look what I've found," or, "Great, I've been looking for this!" moments, it was very hard work.

We now have another room which can actually be used. It's amazing. When it was full of rubbish, I don't think I really appreciated that it was a whole room we could actually be using as living space. We haven't used it as a room for at least 2 years and I wish now that I'd done it a long time ago.

It's already making a difference. Big J likes to have some time to himself; it's something we taught him to do when he was younger if he was getting angry and needed to calm down. The conservatory is the perfect place for him to do that. It's a quiet room to sit and think without all the noise of the rest of the family. He has taken in some of his pencils for the art table we've set up, which he is keen to start using, and he spent 20 mins in there practising his karate kata.

I have no doubt we will all benefit from the additional space in our own ways. Me? Need you ask?

Where to start?

As I sit in my living room, surrounded by parts of the dismantled Christmas tree, boxes usefully marked 'Xmas Stuff' and decorations which have not yet made it to the living room floor, but still hang from the ceiling by the same precarious strip of tape they were attached by in December, I don't really know where to start. Being a teacher, I often have this problem; there is so much to do, how do I know which to do first?

Yes, I know the decorations should have been down by the 6th and that it is bad luck if they are still up after that. Actually, I have a theory about that...

The start of the year is an opportunity for a fresh start. In fact every day is an opportunity for a fresh start, but this seems to escape many people's notice, as they prefer only to do the 'fresh start' when it is marked on the calendar, which sort of defeats the object of starting fresh and being motivated, if you are waiting for someone else to tell you when to do it, but that aside, Many people like to start afresh on 1st January and so, I think the 'get your decorations down by the 6th' superstition is linked to that, the idea being that to move forward in the right frame of mind, you must pack away the Christmas paraphernalia. It's a way of accepting that Christmas is over for this year.

I, you will be unsurprised to hear, think differently. It is good to keep the decorations up, because those first few days back to work in January can be gloomy. We feel tired after the excitement and hustle and bustle of Christmas and could do with another week off. The house looks bare after the tinsel and garland are packed away. It is somewhat depressing putting all those little tree ornaments back into tissue line shoe boxes. I hate that feeling. Keeping the house looking sparkly lets us hold on to that feeling of fun for a little while longer. We have had a great couple of weeks, putting the Christmas lights on when we know it is not really Christmas any more.

Unfortunately, Larry decided it was time to put it all away. He got the boxes out of the loft and deposited them in the middle of the living room. Now, that I can't live with. I tried to ignore them, but after a week, they are really in the way, so I'm afraid, Christmas really is over in our house now.

Will it still feel so depressing after taking the remaining decorations down and packing them all away? Who knows. It will feel tidy again, though, which I guess is something. Now, where shall I start...?