Sometimes mania's a good thing

It was a really rough week and I was looking forward to this weekend, where, due to Eli straining his neck and therefore opting out of the wrestling tournament, we had absolutely no plans. After an anticlimactic Saturday where I didn't accomplish much of anything, I invited some friends over for dinner on Sunday. My motivation was twofold. One, we haven't seen them lately and they're our family BFF's. We missed them. Two, if I invited people over I would be forced to clean the house. So I woke up, drank a pot of coffee, popped a B12, and five hours later I had the kids' rooms AND the playroom cleaned, organized, and in some cases, disinfected. I was ruthless and we dumped about 7 bags of garbage/non-joy-producing crap. The result is that there is a place for everything and everything in it's place. My soul is happy.

Before

After

Dinner was a blast. There were eight kids between 2 and 9 running amok while the adults drank and told stories and shot the shit. When they left everyone made the obligatory "sorry we trashed your house!" apologies (probably spawned by my "Look how pretty!" tour when they got here). But you guys! It took us less than 15 minutes to put it all back together. That includes scraping playdough from the walls. It was a beautiful, beautiful thing. I woke up this morning absolutely giddy.

I was texting with a friend the other day about how we relax and refresh, and we were commiserating on our lack of ability to laze. I HATE to be lazy, unless I'm reading a really good book. I despise getting to the end of the day and accomplishing nothing and I never feel rejuvinated by it. On the other hand, let me spend half a day surrounded by chaos only to be able to create order out of it and I'm a whole new person. I'm calling it "active relaxation." Not sure if that's a thing, but I'm totally owning it.

Seriously. Life changing.