Cortisol

I love going on vacations, but I also love being back at home once the vacation is over. I don't think I would enjoy a vacation that lasted much more than two weeks. The longest time that Paul and I have been away from home the past 18 years was our 3 week trip to China in 2006. Similarly, it's wonderful having relatives stay with us, but I also love it when life returns back "to normal" after their departure. I don't think my kids agree with me in this aspect. When the cousins were here I missed out on hugs and snuggling that I am accustomed to as my boys were so focused on playing with their cousins they never asked to cuddle with Mom, which typically they request every day. I also missed enjoying chapter books together with the kids. The change I most appreciate is that the house returns back to normal. I have a strong aversion to clutter. Early on Paul dubbed me "the chucker" because I am prone to decluttering on a regular basis. Every once in a blue moon I regret that I donated or threw something away, but that happens infrequently enough that it does not dissuade me. I don't like a cluttered email inbox or clutter around the house. One

area I've been working on the past few months is the kitchen countertop. It easily becomes a dumping ground when we walk in the door for the mail and so much more. When we came home from church today, I had to remind the kids to immediately put their Bibles, choir folders, and Kids' Cash (from church) in the appropriate basket because they were about to put all of those items on the counter.

When you have additional people living in your home, you are definitely going to have more clutter. Knowing that clutter affects me more than I wish it did, I purposefully set up the four air mattresses in the kids' three bedrooms. I knew those rooms would have very little (or zero) empty floor space, but I also knew I spend very little time in those rooms. Ian's room definitely was the most cluttered as in addition to two air mattresses there were clothes and stuffed animals and books strewn all over the floor. It was hard to know where to step when I'd go in to tuck Ian in bed each night. I did a load of laundry so that I could send the

kids back to Maryland with clean clothes in their bags. I also thought that might help me sort clothes as it seemed that Joel's, Ian's, and Nathan's clothes had all merged together on the floor of his room. I also didn't have the kids clean up the toys in the basement until Thursday morning. If I needed to get something from the basement, I tried to avert my eyes from the mess. We definitely needed the dining room table on the day when there were 15 of us eating pizza together, but in hindsight I wish I had brought the Legos back up the next day and not used the dining room table for eating after the first night. I didn't wise up until Thursday morning. On Thursday the kids ate all their meals in the kitchen together as I added a seventh chair, and I just ate standing up. Having the kids eat at both tables definitely increased the amount of cleaning after each meal as we have carpet in the dining room and the kids would drop food (ex. a goldfish cracker) on the floor, step on it, and I didn't want the crumbs smashed down into the carpet so I ended up vacuuming in that room once or twice a day whereas usually I vacuum that room once a week or every two weeks. Plus there were Legos strewn ALL over the basement floor, and that wouldn't have been the case had I had them move the Legos back up to the dining room five days earlier than I did. Lesson learned! I also should have immediately thrown away the play-doh type material that Julianna and Oliver came home with on Sunday because I found little bits of that green substance all over the house.

Basically my goal was to keep the main floor of the house looking fairly normal. I asked the kids to clean up some toys periodically, and I spent a lot of time cleaning that floor every day - far more time than I usually spend. There were many more spills in the kitchen, a toilet overflowed in the bathroom and no one told me about it, and the guinea pigs spent FAR more time out of their cage than usual. They haven't had a peeing type accident in years (without any attempts to train them on our part), but one time Julianna had Jenna out and forgot about her and the little guinea pig was hiding in between the closed cage and the wall when I discovered her, and she had an accident on the hardwood floor. My kids know to clean up pellets as the guinea pigs definitely have plenty of those accidents all the time. Thankfully as the guinea pigs are vegetarians their solid waste is dry. But the cousins didn't know to clean those up (they've never owned a guinea pig) plus my kids usually clean up any bedding that comes out when they get the guinea pigs out, but again their cousins had no experience with this so there was a boatload of bedding on our floors last week. I invested far more time than usual in cleaning this floor of the house, but as a result the mess and clutter wasn't bothering me until Thursday. On Thursday it was a lot colder out and so the kids pulled lots and lots of things out of the foyer closet. I walked into the foyer and there was hardly any place to walk without standing on a pair of mittens, coat, scarf, pair of shoes, etc. I lost it. I didn't yell or say anything to the kids, but I had a small panic attack. Ian asked me why he could hear me breathing across the room. I worked to calm myself down and then went back to cleaning so that at least the main floor of the house didn't look like a bomb had recently gone off.

I have three siblings and clutter didn't/ doesn't bother any of them. I had no idea that you could have SO many tabs open at one time on an iPad until after my brother passed away. I am wondering if he ever closed a tab while he owned that device. It took me quite awhile to close them all out. I learned later you can have up to 500 tabs open on an iPad. I didn't count how many he had open, but it was mind boggling to me. My sister, Wendy, said she views her toleration of messiness as a weakness, but a few days ago I was wishing clutter didn't bother me as much as it does. I started to think is something wrong with me? Am I crazy? I did a search online and read an article  that talked about a study done at Cornell University in which they analyzed saliva and found that  for some women, "clutter can trigger the release of the stress hormone cortisol, which can increase tension and anxiety." Men did not exhibit the same results in that study (clutter didn't cause their bodies to produce more cortisol). I thought that clutter didn't bother my husband, but when he heard me saying I wished that clutter didn't bother me so much, he piped up that he was grateful for the way I kept our house. Thank you, Paul! Anyhow this article helped me understand why it feels like I have such a strong physical response to clutter. Now to see how many weeks it will take me to find all the parts of our Sorry! game. I have found cards and little colored pieces in quite a few rooms of our house including the kitchen and Ian's bedroom. Let's just say in the story about Mary and Martha in the Bible, I have great empathy for Martha.

It had said on my chore app that I was to clean the van and garage the weekend the cousins were here, but I purposefully delayed that a week knowing that things in the garage would be rearranged more than usual and there would probably be more things to vacuum in the van that usual given we had seven kids instead of three. When something is LONG overdue, the color changes to red for that particular chore. I have earned a RED for cleaning the bathtub since it's now 22 days overdue, but it's going to stay red until that bathtub project is complete. Hopefully soon!