Book and House Notes: OCD Edition

So, I let my house fall to bits this week. It’s pretty devastating. I worked so hard to clean it up before we really and truly started school, and then I was miraculously on top of it the first week, but then I had to do a whole bunch of stuff at church, and, as per usual, I can’t do the stuff over there and the stuff over here at the same time and so the dismal wreckage brought about by inattention took over. I feel like I should be able to be in two places at once but my feelings never translate into reality.

It all comes from waiting until the last minute.
But you had to wait to the last minute because you were doing a bunch of other stuff that needed doing. It’s not procrastination. It’s having too many things to do.

Anyway, I will soon (as in about two weeks) be done with all the things at church and then I will be able to do the things at home. Am I boring you? Truly, I am boring myself.

Now that my children are not quite so little, the obsessive and compulsive portions of my personality are coming into full vibrant bloom. Not having little tiny people crawling along taking everything out of the drawers and just throwing them down, or coloring on the walls with marker, or making trails of Cheerios all over carpets, or taking all the books off the shelves and tearing a few pages out of each one, or pouring kitty litter into the bath and getting in with it, or taking makeup and grinding it into the carpet, or going outside to sit in the mud and then coming back in to sit on the newly washed couch cushions…means that theoretically I should have a house that runs decently and in order. It should only take a few minutes to really get in shape. You just collect all the cups from where they’ve wandered, turn the dishwasher on, and sweep the floor. That’s what it should be. Everyone should have easily been able to restore the item required for some purpose or other back to its original location. It would just take two seconds, that’s all, just two seconds…

Five years ago, if you had told me that I would be upset about a little bit of dust in the living room, and shoes left on the porch, I would have wanted to punch you in the face because, I would have said, ‘I should be so lucky.’ But now I am so lucky and it totally makes my blood boil.

So, for my “day off” I’m going to make the children clean. I already cleaned it and I don’t feel like doing it again. While they’re doing that I’m going to sit in a chair and read some books, and also continue my desperate task of curriculum writing. I will also quietly begin my annual autumnal freakout about the quality of the fall foliage. While you’re off having your foul pumpkin spice latte, I will be looking at each tree in my way and pleading with, and then tearfully demanding God to make it a good one. No flat brown orangey disappointments this year, God, PLEASE.

My booklist this week is still No Little Women, Liturgy of the Ordinary, The Science of Virtue, Fierce Convictions, Booked, Black Lamb, The Drunken Forest, The ‘Life Changing’ Magic of Tidying Up, Intellectuals and Race, and A Very Private Eye. I don’t know if I’ll be able to finish any of them this week, but I might. Who knows.

I have just recently finished Moments and Days by Michelle Van Loon, and Is The Bible Good For Women by Wendy Alsup. Truly, I know I keep saying I’m going to write about them, and I will. I just don’t want to do it in a rushed, frantic way. I want to do it when I have a few minutes of sanity. Look, I’m a slow reader, I am. It’s who I am it’s who I am it’s who I am.

And now, if you’ll excuse me, these children aren’t going to yell at themselves. Pip pip.