Why do I want my house to be clean?

For the past month or so I've been posting pictures on Facebook and I even wrote a post about this topic here. I've been struggling with keeping my house clean because there were constantly toys everywhere!!! Well, we went through the playroom and living room thoroughly one weekend and got rid of some more toys that the kids don't play with anymore. We got a 9 cube storage unit for the playroom and moved the little kiddie table from the corner to the middle of the room. That table gets a lot more use now than it ever did in the corner!!

We have a new rule that we clean up before snack time every night before bed. We also clean up before lunch on weekends and the days that I don't work. This has been working very well and I can honestly say that I feel great since we started doing this. With Little E I still have to help him with it a bit, but once I show him that we are putting things into bins, he follows. And Big E fights me sometime with cleaning up but I just tell her that she doesn't get lunch or snack until it is cleaned up and then she starts.

It's so funny how a small change like this can make me feel so good, but it does. Just looking around the house and seeing it all cleaned up makes me happy and feel accomplished. I wish I could say the rest of the house looks as good as the downstairs does, but it doesn't. I'm slowly working on that though. I need to clean off the top of my dresser and clean out my closet sometime soon. I also need to go through both kids' closets and drawers and weed out the clothes that don't fit him!! Little E is in 18 month clothing and I still have 12 month pants in his drawers!! Before you know it he will be wearing size 24 months!!!

In the past I would stress out about not having enough time to clean up and having toys all over the place. But I finally feel like I've found a system that works for us. Sure I still have dishes piling up in the sink every now and then and sometimes the counters aren't the cleanest, but that's ok. Another thing I'm proud of is that I'm teaching my kids at a young age to keep the house clean and pick up after themselves! I remember when I was younger that my bedroom was almost always a mess!! Maybe I wasn't taught at a young age to pick up like I'm doing with my kids, who knows.