Hour-a-Day April: Days 12 and 13

Day 12 (Saturday): Jer took the girls to an Easter egg hunt in the morning, so John Wallace and I had the house to ourselves. This is what we usually do on Saturday mornings - Daddy and the girls have an outing, and I stay home and clean during the baby's morning nap. Since cleaning on Saturday morning is my normal routine, I wasn't sure how to count it for HADA. I ultimately decided that my goal would be to spend one hour on routine tasks, and one hour on more "HADA-worthy" tasks.

I felt like I needed to use this time for something dramatic, so I tackled my much-neglected bedroom. When we moved here last year, we deliberately chose the smallest bedroom to be ours, because, let's face it, any available floor space in our bedroom just becomes littered with clothes in varying degrees of clean. I figured the less floor space we have available, the less cluttered our room would become. That said, the sea of clothes was still a bit daunting.

I put in an hour, and I was on a roll, but I forced myself to stop and eat some lunch. Then JW woke up, which put a halt to my room-cleaning project, so I moved on to laundry and dishes. I managed to squeeze in another hour of cleaning, before Jer got home and convinced me to come along to a birthday party (I wanted to send him alone with the kids so I could keep cleaning). I'm glad I went, though. It was a nice break, nice to see friends, and I had renewed energy when we got home. I threw together a casserole, stuck it in the oven to bake, and went back to work on my room. The casserole took an hour, but I had to stop to nurse the baby shortly before the timer beeped, so I think I just fell short of a second hour. I almost finished, though, which was nice. Just a few straggler items to deal with tomorrow.

After dinner, I tackled Mount Laundry. (Aside: I actually have two Mount Laundries. Mount Dirty Laundry in the laundry room, and Mount Clean Laundry on the guest room bed. Today's project was focused on Mount Clean.) I've been pretty good about folding clothes right out of the dryer, and laying hang-up clothes neatly in a pile, so it wasn't too much work to sort and put away Mount Clean, but it was about 7 loads of laundry, so it took some time. The girls helped me sort socks and hang up their dresses, too, which was nice. I think that was another hour.

Day 13 (Sunday): Early morning worship team practice, then church, then we went straight to a family birthday party. I didn't set foot inside the house until 5 p.m. And I was bone tired by the time I did. I talked to Jer, and decided that a nap was necessary if I was going to get my hour in today. So I went to bed for an hour. Ate a light dinner (since we'd had just eaten a big, birthday party lunch), then spent half an hour on dishes. Then I went up to my room and finished up the last few straggler items (which always take longer than you think they will - I think it was about 45 minutes). I sorted through the boxes of clothes that were on the floor, and set aside a couple piles for Jeremy to sort through, and one box of things I can still wear from before pregnancy. (Since I was pregnant when we moved, there are lots of pre-pregnancy clothes still in boxes. It was exciting to discover that they fit, though! Are bell-bottoms still in style?)

Bonus helper photo:

13 days down, 17 to go!