White Sofas, and Helga, and Children... OH MY!

Targeted Obsession: Home Decor

"How does your house stay clean with two small kids?" Or... "How do you have white furniture with a baby and a 4 year old?" Or... "Where are all the toys?" Never in a million years would I have thought people would ask me those questions. Honestly, it'd probably be more accurate if you asked me how I have a husband and white sofas! Hehe...  No. For real.

I'll tell you the truth. My living room (where the white sofas are located) is an adult zone. It was this way from day one. We got our white furniture when my son was 2 and from the get-go we knew that we wanted our living room to be adult-friendly. Everything we do is "kid friendly." We decided we deserved an "adult friendly" space. To do this, we designated the upstairs in our home as "where toys live" and downstairs as the opposite. I do have a SMALL basket of toys in my bedroom, but I'll get to that in a moment. When our family hangs out, we do it upstairs in our bonus room. The best tv is upstairs, the toys are upstairs, we eat upstairs, we spill upstairs... basically, upstairs is where we live. Because of that, all we needed was to do establish a few rules in order to help our white furniture survive kids.

• When we come in, we take off anything "dirty" (clothes, shoes, whatever- kids AND adults do this).
• After we eat, we immediately wash our hands (this is probably my FAVORITE established rule- it's so ingrained in my son now that he always cleans up after he eats, which has saved more living rooms than just mine. Start 'em early!) ;) 
• We don't walk around with food.
• Food can go anywhere BUT the living room.

But for some reason, people think my home looks CLEAN. That shocks me. My home is far from clean. I'll be honest- I'm not a clean person. I'm a tidy person, not a cleaner. Being a tidy person, I do grab the lone shoes sitting by the couch and toss them into the laundry room when I notice them. I also have a "catch all" bowl sitting on our most prominent counter space and I'll drop random stuff (i.e. HotWheels) in frequently. My boys leave things around like boys tend to do, but I immediately grab whatever they drop and put it away thanks to my tidy tendencies. It's so nice now that Ridge is old enough for me to tell him to put his own stuff away when I see it. Ivan has passed that age, so I just grab his stuff and keep on rolling. But I'm not clean. If you look closely, there's dust on everything. Ivan cleans our toilets (I've decided it's because boys look at toilets more than girls do due to their angle of approach!) and we both try to keep the kitchen in working order. The one thing we struggled with was our hardwoods.

Every room on our main floor (except the office) is hardwood. They're super dark and I love them! However, they show EVERYTHING! Combine that with our dog who sheds like it's her job and we'd find ourselves whistling as we watched tumble weeds blow across our floors. We'd use our hand vac multiple times a day and would still have tumble weeds. It was ridiculous... and then my amazing neighbor told me about the Rumba. I was sold. My husband did some research and decided he wanted a Neato. My mother-in-law bought me one (because she's the BEST) and the rest is history. This thing does some serious vacuuming. It really does make my home look clean. We love it so much, that we've given it a name. Helga is a very real member of our family now! She does way more cleaning than me. 

Helga in action.

Helga is one of the main reason my home looks clean. Baskets are another. As I mentioned earlier, we keep a few key toys in a small basket in our bedroom. Those are the downstairs toys. And now that we have a baby there's a small basket of baby toys in the living room. Basket toys are easy to get out and put away. So they seem to stay tidy on their own. 

The baby's downstairs toy stash.

And that's all I've got. The rest of our downstairs stays clean because we don't really use it. Just don't walk into our bedroom or go upstairs. Or do! And then you'd see it's all a farce! Trying to walk in our bonus room is like trying to navigate a mine field.

So, if I were to give advice based off of my farce:

Take off dirty things, have an adult zone, have "food rules," use baskets, and get your own Helga. Having a space where everyone can do as they please (i.e. our bonus room) makes it all possible. OR.. we can just all enjoy our lives and beautiful messes because there are things that are way more important than getting all of the toys back into the baskets! Until next time...