In honor of my continuing efforts to appreciate what I already have, I have decided to recruit (or force, however you want to look at it), my children into "operation organization" in our house.

Now, tackling "operation organization" is a long, arduous, and continuous process. Step one is to know what you have and give everything in your house its own space. If we know where things belong, we can find them when we need them, and clean them up easily. Sounds quite simple, yet most of us have junk drawers in our kitchens (I happen to have 2!)

I have been working on my home room by room to break the project down into manageable steps. Last weekend, I decided it was time for the garage and the play room. Yes, very ambitious of me, but it was the start of Spring and so I wanted to celebrate with a little Spring cleaning.

I gave each child an area of the playroom to sort. We would take everything out of that area, and then put the items into categories. Once we had thrown away any trash or pieces of games that no longer existed (I'm embarassed to say we filled an entire trash bag!), I was going to have them each choose some toys to give to charity. My daughter beat me to the punch. She is six, and I've been attempting to teach her about giving to those in need for quite some time. So imagine my great pride when she announced "Mom, I want to give this pile of toys away to other children!" I almost burst with pride. As I pictured myself accepting the "mother of the year" award from Parents magazine, she added "Can we put them on a table in front of the house with a sign and I can charge money for them and buy another game for my DS?" [imagine the sound of a deflating balloon here]

Well, she is SIX, so I won't beat myself up too much. As Clark would say, she's an entrepreneur. In the mean time, the playroom is neat for now, and my children rediscovered toys they hadn't played with in years. As an aside, I chose to clean the garage because my husband was out of town for the weekend, and so I know he will never miss all of the junk - I mean valuable guy things - that are magically no longer in there.