Is that show Clean Sweep still on? I haven’t seen it in a looooong time, if it is. I think the Clean Sweep people need to come and visit my husband. I can’t understand how we had a MASSIVE, ginormous, insane garage sale when we moved, and another garage sale in the springtime, and Salvation Army came and picked up a bunch of stuff in my driveway a few months ago, and still…STILL, I am drowning in a sea of clutter. We have a stack of boxes in our master bedroom that hasn’t moved much over the past twelve months. These boxes drive me insane. Several times, I’ve tried to go through them, and it’s just too overwhelming. We discussed tackling this mess during the eleven days my husband was off work for the holidays, but it just didn’t happen. Either I was sick or the kids were sick, and it didn’t happen. We didn’t take the kids to that chipmunk movie, either. Damn!

But today is a new day. It’s Monday, and it’s back to work for the man and back to school for the oldest. The little ones are still home with me for a bit longer, but they’re obsessed with Nick Jr online lately, so I could probably paint the entire house without them noticing. I decided that today would be the day. So, armed with coffee and motivation, I started opening boxes. Out of the probably dozen or so boxes, I unpacked two. The rest, I labeled with sticky notes so my husband can see at a glance what’s inside – but I can summarize it for you in two words: HIS SHIT.

I’m stunned by how many boxes and boxes of MAGAZINES we moved. What is it with men and magazines? What is the purpose of keeping years and years worth of Popular Mechanics and Playboy? Will he ever look at them again? I can pretty much guarantee that the answer is NO. But they’ll be our legacy, mark my words. We may not have much to pass on to our children, but they’ll never want for mediocre porn or outdated tech articles. And if they get tired of reading old magazines, they can listen to an entire crate of mix tapes from the 80s! Maybe they’ll stumble upon some old relic computer from our generation and they can install tons of outdated software on it – I have an entire box of it, just waiting for them. And for some light reading, they can kick back with stacks of college textbooks.

Spring cleaning is here – and now that I’ve gotten the ball rolling, I’m certain that my husband will be ready to dive into this cache of crap, and do something with it all. I just know it! In the meantime, I need to figure out what to do with a king size memory foam mattress topper, now that we have a new bed that it won’t fit on. It’s rolled up and pushed in the corner of the room like a gigantic Chipotle burrito, but it’s really got to go!

Today marks a year that we’ve lived in our “new” house. I’ve decided that I should officially stop calling it our new house, hence the quotation marks. I’m fighting an awful cold, as are a couple of my children, and we spent much of today on the sofa. As I flipped through the channels, I kept thinking back to a year ago, and contrasting what a different day today was than last December 27th! Four huge truckloads of stuff, and the last one wasn’t unloaded until nearly midnight. The kids were on Christmas break, and the weeks that followed were downright chaotic. It’s hard having bored kids underfoot while trying to unpack. It was nice to look around my cozy house today – even littered with new toys from Christmas, it’s a much different scene than it was a year ago.

Two thousand and nine was a tough year in a lot of ways. It was such a year of change for our family, with the new house and new schools. Even when change is for the better, it’s so difficult to go through it. And unfortunately for myself, I spent much of the year feeling like I wasn’t changing for the better. So many times, I felt like I couldn’t find my way. I wanted our house to instantly feel like home to me, to feel like the sanctuary our old home was, and to feel uniquely ours, the way our old home did. Of course, that can’t happen immediately – it takes time to make something your own. It takes time for people to get to know you. It takes time for children to stop being “the new kids” at school. And it takes a hell of a lot of time to go through a house and put your own special touch in every room.

I should point out that I am not an organized person by nature. (My husband is, thank God, or our lives would be falling down around us.) Between my messy tendencies and my unfortunate propensity for feeling guilty about my many flaws, I dealt with a massive amount of anxiety this past year. It’s only been in recent weeks that I’ve started recognizing the role depression has played in my inability to get shit done. Last year, right around this time, I stopped taking the antidepressant I’d been taking for years. I was going through a period of health concerns and serious headaches, and I was trying to pinpoint exactly what was causing my headaches. I decided to wean myself off the antidepressants to see if my headaches went away. They did! And I seemed to be doing okay, so I never refilled my prescription after our move.

I’m realizing now that I made such a dumb decision in doing that. For me, depression manifests itself not in sadness, but in anxiety and in feelings of being so overwhelmed that I can’t figure out how to tackle a situation. And I don’t really understand why it’s so hard to take my own advice – I can’t even tell you how many times I’ve told girlfriends of mine not to be afraid or ashamed to take antidepressants, because depression doesn’t just go away on its own. When it comes to my own health or my own psyche, it’s like I’m a total dumbass, though.

That’s one thing I intend to do differently in 2010. I work so hard to take care of my family, but think nothing of putting myself last – like I just don’t have it in me to think about my own needs. I heard someone recently compare it to putting on your own oxygen mask on an airplane before helping someone else. How can I really be supermom if I super-suck at taking care of myself? I started taking my meds again a few weeks ago, and already I’m feeling better. Now if I could just shake this stupid cold!

One of the things I really love about my husband is how I always feel safe with him. He’s a big dude, and can be intimidating if he wants to be. It’s like the best of both worlds, really: he’s such a super nice guy, and people so often seem relieved to discover that he’s not some aggressive badass, they fall all over themselves being accommodating. I love that we can go anywhere, any time, and nobody EVER gives us a hard time or talks shit to him. It’s downright delightful.

And I feel like sort of an authority on being messed with, because I used to be married to a guy who was NOT the least bit intimidating. He was a fairly small guy, not the least bit confrontational, and people obviously picked up on that vibe, because they messed with us all the time! So often, we’d be at a show or a bar or restaurant, and some drunk asshole would start hassling us. And it was always ME having to resolve the situation. I hated that! I’m very pleased that I’ve left behind that whole phase of my life. What can I say: I like my man to be the man, y’know?

Today, I was having lunch out with my daughters and I overheard a couple of guys a table away from us. They were 30ish, dressed business casual, and totally engaged in their conversation about…TWILIGHT. They were talking about seeing New Moon over the weekend with their wives, and actually discussing the differences between the book and the movie. It was like listening to my teenage daughter and her best friend going on about who is hotter, Jacob or Edward.

I can understand guys going to see Twilight with their wives; I drag my husband to see movies I pick out all the time. But if he started talking about Twilight with his buddies, they’d probably threaten to punch him in the vagina. Come on, guys – we let you have Transformers. Leave Twilight for the girls!

I have stumbled upon a phenomenon I can barely get my head around, and it seemed important enough that it could CHANGE LIVES – so naturally, I’m blogging about it.

Did you KNOW…your house will stay clean if you turn off your computer? Yeah. Crazy shit, I know. But hear me out. It turns out, if you spend just one hour a day cleaning, your house will sparkle and shine. Who knew? Now, I’m not talking about “picking up” or “straightening the front room” or anything like that. I’m talking about actual c-l-e-a-n-i-n-g.

I performed this little experiment this week. Every day, I picked something to focus on for a solid hour. One day, I did the kitchen – REALLY scrubbing the surfaces, shining the appliances, actually moving the table and chairs out of here to mop – all of it. Another day, I vacuumed every inch of carpet in the house, including the stairs, and using the crevice tool to get around everything. And on another day, I dusted everything. Cough. Choke. I didn’t realize what a pit this place was. But you should see my house! It’s soooo cleeeeean! (Underneath all the toy clutter.)

If you spend one uninterrupted hour every day with a sponge or a vacuum in your hand at all times, your house will shine. For reals.

Until your kids walk in the door from school, anyway.

That’s a Snoop Dogg lyric, did you know that? Betcha didn’t. I don’t imagine Big Snoopy D-O-double-G was considering the plight of the stay-at-home-mother when he wrote it, but I can sure relate to it.

Things are swell. Things are great! Things are a train wreck and a half! I keep thinking that if I just embrace it and own it and realize once and for all that this is our normal, I’ll deal with things better. So that’s what I’m going to do. I’m just going to write about it so it all makes sense for me, because I really think it’s scariest when it’s inside my own head. Once I get it out in the open, it’s like, eh. No biggie.

My oldest child is seriously struggling in school. We’re almost mid-way through freshman year, and thing’s aren’t going well. She’s so painfully unmotivated, and it’s something we’ve been dealing with for the past four years now. I can’t even begin to list all the many ways we’ve tried to light a fire under her ass. She’s just so damned apathetic, and it’s something I see over and over with kids her age. We want so badly for our kids to have what we didn’t have, and to not have to struggle or go without, and because of it, they value NOTHING. My husband grew up poor, and actually was homeless several times as a child. He’s mentioned many times that he wishes our kids could go through a safer version of what he went through, just so they’d know what it’s like to not have electricity or to have to sleep in the car. I don’t know that we need to go THAT far with it, but I sure wish there was a way to boot these kids in the ass a little, and make them realize that the world doesn’t revolve around them and their skinny jeans. I think I’m going to start dragging my daughter out on Saturday mornings to volunteer in a soup kitchen or something.

Besides the drama with the teenager, I feel like I’m losing my mind a little in this crazy house. Or my hearing, anyway. I’ve never been around such LOUD children before. From the time they wake up until the time they snuggle up and fall asleep at night, they are SHOUTING at one another. I’m sure it’s at least partially genetic, since I’m married to the loudest man on the planet. Normally, I’m not bothered by it at all, but it seems like they’ve cranked it up to eleven this week. We need to start a marathon round of The Quiet Game.

And when I left my house today, it was CLEAN. It even smelled good. Every bed was made, every inch of carpet vacuumed. Within an hour of returning home with four monkeys, the house looked like I hadn’t touched it. I found toys, shoes, books, and clothing on the floor in five different rooms before dinnertime. Erma Bombeck once said that trying to clean house when you have small children is like shoveling while it’s still snowing. I can’t think of a better comparison! Still, I’m thankful that I have my five monsters, and we have a roof over our heads. Things could definitely be worse.

Tomorrow, I think I’m going to take myself out for sushi.