Flipping channels late at night, relishing the snores of children throughout the house, I came across a show about messy houses. I don’t know the name of what I was watching, I was just astonished that two people could have trashed the house so much, heck it takes 40 of us to do so, and fortunately we can also get it cleaned quickly.

The host of this show was walking around picking up stuff and asking, “Is this really essential to your life?”

Responding to everyone’s questions about organization and “How do you handle everything?” knowing I have a large family, I think our ability to organize boils down to my total lack of interest in stuff. Stuff weighs me down, it is not essential.

Food and shelter are essential, the rest seems superfluous to me.

It seems as if I ended up with a family of hoarders, which is a natural result to the lack they once lived with.

Organization is a constant battle here. The kid’s rooms, their book bags, their school desks and everywhere they traipse seems to result in chaos and disorganization. Yesterday on the first day of school it appeared each kid dumped their book bag out in the living room and brought me piles of folded up, wrinkled papers to fill out and sign which I did carefully, handing them back, smoothed out to each child, only to discover half of it never returned to their satchels.

Here’s an agenda book, a note for the teacher, a hairbrush and two textbooks that didn’t get put away. This morning cereal bowls were on the table, trash wrappers near the trashcan but on the floor, cups on the counter, and dirty socks in the pantry for some odd reason.

I work on this with the kids and I am constantly exasperated. This year with everyone in school, after ten years of toddlers, babies and diapers, I am finding that when I sweep, it stays swept for longer than two minutes. I’ve had zero dishes in the sink today from 8:30; it’s 2:30 now. That has not happened since I’ve owned this house and I was in my thirties back when I bought it.

That’s life with a big family. One never catches up on laundry, cleaning, buying groceries or anything else. I feel as if I’m making progress, but swimming upstream definitely.