cleaning your house

I suck at this. SUCK. Is that too strong of language? I really struggle with keeping our house tidy much less clean. It’s not because I’m pregnant. It’s not because I have three little kids. It’s because I have life-long bad habits. So, of course, I’ve read a ton of books about spacial awareness and organizing and cleaning and having a “system.” Gretchen Rubin’s Happier at Home, Charles Duhigg’s Power of Habit, David Eaglemen’s Incognito, Marie Kondo’s The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up, and a few others. I do love pop psych books! I’ve learned a few tips and tricks from these books, but mostly I’ve learned by observing myself. I made myself my own anthropological study. Sprawling around your house while insanely sick and pregnant gives one ample time to observe oneself and the last ten weeks of pregnancy, I observed a lot from my various supine positions, occasionally on the {dirty} kitchen floor, often times in the open hallway between the kids’s rooms to met out judicial proclamations from on-low, and even from the bathroom, noting my crowded cupboards and clean half-folded towels on the floor under the sink, surrounded by dust-bunny colonies. Here’s what I discovered: I have no urgency for putting things away AND I have no place to put them away even if I wanted to. There. That’s the secret to a clean simple space: put things away into their place as soon as humanly possible. So you must first have a particular spot for your things. For kids’ artwork, chewed…