Well hello there, Reader!
Phew, we’ve made it through break. I don’t know about you, but I am ready to get back to some routine, we’ll be talking all about that next week on the podcast, but for today, I want to tell you about my decluttering journey.
If you listened to the Health Harmony and Happiness Gift Giving Guide episode last month, you heard me talk a little about the decluttering my kids and I have been doing over the past year. And actually, this desire within me to maintain a simpler environment around me goes all the way back to before I even had kids, possibly before I was even married if I’m remembering correctly.
I knew back then that I wanted to be mindful of what was brought into our home. Back then I read the book Living Simply with Children and everything about it made me want to live more minimally, even before being a minimalist was a thing.
But alas, after child number one arrived we thought we needed all the things, and as more kids arrived on the scene, actually living simply with children vanished for the most part.
Yet I still felt this nudge inside me to align with that mentality of having less and creating “white space” in our home so that our energy could be spent connecting and building relationships to feel safe and nourished rather than trying to fill those needs with stuff.
So I would go through spurts of clearing stuff out, but never really had a systematic plan to eliminate the clutter or at least get a handle on it. I had experimented with other systems, but it wasn’t until I met my friend Krista, that I actually started making huge progress in creating more white space in our home…
…and by doing so, really starting to understand more about myself in the process.
- I don’t find myself nagging the kids to pick their stuff up nearly as much as I used to. (It turns out when they have less stuff, they aren’t overwhelmed by it when it’s time to clean up. Kinda like you and me…overwhelm often means we don’t know where to begin with a project.)
- I have more time to actually sit and play or snuggle with both my kids and my husband.
- I stay on top of laundry and don’t have baskets of clean clothes sitting around the house anymore because I’ve completely changed the way I approach laundry.
- I’m better able to flow with life because it’s easier to let things go and trust the that when it’s needed in my life it will return to me if I really need it. (Yep, that one’s kind of woo woo, but really, Reader, it’s true. I don’t feel the need to be attached to things so much anymore–more trusting, less controlling. And that’s a huge one, friend. Because you’re a warrior like me, you might struggle with this one as well…and that’s OK! I’ve been there and know what it’s like.)
If you’re still with me and intrigued, I’d love it if you checked out the episode in which Krista and I sat down and chatted all things decluttering and how the energy of the STUFF in your house affects you.
Check out the full episode here=>
Krista is a beautiful soul and simplifies decluttering with kids (she has 5 of her own) without becoming a full blown minimalist.
I guess what I liked about her approach to clearing out the clutter in my house was that she was real, relatable and, as I said, has 5 kids (16 all the way down to 3 years old) all of which who have been quite young at some point during her decluttering stages. She knows a thing or 2 about reasonable expectations when trying to tackle a big project. She’s been doing this for years and has a great story about moving homes from Alaska to Florida with only 1 suitcase per person. Mind blowing!
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You’ll have to check it out for yourself. And you can do that here.
Oh, and she has a great deal for you to save on her Decluttering Simplified course–the same one I used (and continue to revisit) to declutter our home. It was probably the 2nd best financial investment I made in 2022…the first being investing in coaching for myself.
Cheers to the new year and your whatever intentions you choose to set!
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