Tag Archives: CocoRoomApocalypse

Empty Nest? I Wish!

Kid off to college leaving you with an empty nest? I WISH!! Seems not cleaning my kids' rooms was an initiative that should have had an exit strategy. Here's how to deal with it. | Parenting Advice| Sisterhood of the Sensible Moms

Empty nest? EMPTY NEST?! Bwahahahaha! I wish. My girl may have launched 1150 miles away to college, but she left her nest anything but empty. I think more fitting words would be disarranged, disorganized, and disgusting. In truth it looked like a mob boss had tossed the room for the secret stashes of cash before fleeing the country.

To her credit, she washed, cleaned, organized, and packed all of her things for college. She managed to do such a good job that she was able to get it all in her allotted suitcases coming in under the airline weight restrictions. But once we returned home from drop-off and the brain bash of leaving my first baby at college drained away, the full disaster of her room walloped me. First it stabbed me in the heart because it looked like she should be arising from the rubble to greet me every morning. Seriously, her bed not only looked like she was still in it, but I swear if you stared at the heap long enough, it looked like it was breathing. My girl used A LOT of blankets since her father keeps the thermostat just north of “meat locker.”

It was with a healthy dose of trepidation that I sidled into the room and threw off the comforter. Hey, she once had a bat doing a jig at the end of her bed so a family of possums setting up camp under there was not beyond the realm of possibilities.

“Whoosh” went the covers and “ewwww” went the very core of my psyche. Had she even changed her sheets in the past three months, wait . . . THREE YEARS? It really could have been longer because I think I stopped cleaning my kids rooms and ceased being the sole laundress when she reached middle school. Silver lining: I still didn’t have to wash the sheets because they went directly into the trash.

But gah! Even though I wasn’t cleaning my daughters’ rooms, they were expected to clean them. But now that I think about it, I never inspected them. I would inspect the bathrooms they decontaminated weekly because I swear the blow dryer would just whisk the mechanics of scrubbing a toilet clean out of their heads. And there was that one time our mismatched sock basket overflowed to Vesuvius levels because apparently it was easier to assume EVERY sock in our dryer was flying solo than it was to match and fold them. But their rooms? If they bothered me too much, I just closed the doors.

I truly thought she had cleaned her room though. I know I had seen it tidy at least once during the Obama administration, but once the stripped bed floated like an oasis in the middle of the room, it became clear that instead of following the “touch-it-once” rule, she was employing the “why-throw-something-away-when-you-can-shove-it-under-your-bed-in-your-closet-in-a-drawer-or-behind-the-trash-can” rule. “Just-leave-it-in-the-middle-of-the-ever-loving-floor” rule was her fail safe for when doing the bare minimum to qualify for lazy was just too taxing.

What started as “I’m just going to just pick up those pencils and put them in the caddy,” turned into a full-on excavation. Oh the treasures I found.

There was the solitary volleyball knee pad that was so old, the spandex crumbled when I picked it up. At least there was a deteriorating lollipop gluing part of it together.

Then I found a little straw dress-up purse that contained such treasures as an expired coupon for toilet bowl cleaner and yet another decaying lollipop. (I’m starting to think her superior dental health was because she liked to hoard candy rather than eat it. Why we didn’t trade dental bills for exterminator fees, I’ll never know.)

Also amongst the rubble was a princess jump rope (permanently tangled), a junior scientist kit (never opened), and one hundred plus eleven lip balms (half of which where plastered to—you guessed it—lollipops).

I’m going to save you any more particulars, but suffice it to say, I filled up three garbage bags with stuff I didn’t even have to think twice about throwing away. Okay, I did pause over the one little purple fuzzy slipper because WHAT IF THE OTHER ONE TURNED UP?? They were pretty stinkin’ adorable.

Seems not cleaning my kids’ rooms was an initiative that should have had an exit strategy. This became abundantly clear when I started stumbling over emotional landmines like her “All About Me” kindergarten profile, the stuffed cat she use to snuggle with, and her stack of Webkinz adoption certificates. Those trips down memory lane would have been so much better with her rather than by myself three weeks into her departure when the ache of not seeing her was starting to set in. Silver lining: I had the cover of dirt dervishes to explain my reddened eyes and snuffly nose.

I really meant for the Big Clean to happen over the summer with her fully in charge; but when faced with grief or change I tend to “panic travel.” It’s like a driving force that overtakes me, compelling me to move forward and make new memories rather than dwell with the ghosts of the past, no matter how cute they are.

Besides, I hate to clean, too. Going to Philly was soooo much more fulfilling than battling dust bunnies.

Oh, but snooker me once . . . you’re obviously the oldest child. Second child: don’t even think about it. You’ll have to blaze your own trail to elude me because this pathway has been scorched.

My 10th grader is shoveling out her room even as we speak . . . under protest of course. “My sister made it all the way out of the house before having to do this and now YOU’RE cleaning her room.”

True, but I did leave this wall of memorabilia for her to deal with. I’m COMPLETELY positive I won’t be the one taking it down weeks after her wedding day. I just wasn’t ready to turn her nest into the perfect guest room quite yet. She needs somewhere familiar to land when she comes homes to roost every once in a while.

Got clutter? Get clean and organized with a Memorabilia Jar. Easy DIY project. | Sisterhood of the Sensible Moms

I’ll leave you with a pro tip since we are after all the Sensible Moms. My girl has a TON of knick-knacks as you can see. I consolidated a bit of the tedious mess by putting the smallest treasures in a two gallon glass container creating a Memorabilia Jar. It truly cut down the clutter more than it may seem. The biggest trick to it is to put some boxy types items in the center so that everything gets displayed around the perimeter.

Got clutter? Get clean and organized with a Memorabilia Jar. Easy DIY project. | Sisterhood of the Sensible Moms

-Ellen

Kid is off to college but my nest is more dirty and cluttered than empty. Can you relate?

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[Speaking of memory lane, I found the post I wrote when we redecorated my daughter’s room five years ago. I actually wrote about how I would be happy for the massive clean out I was doing then because it would save me from doing it when she went away to college. I don’t know whether to be grateful for the realization that THIS cleaning could have been worse or to tip over laughing at my delusion that a whole new mountain of stuff wouldn’t accumulate in five years time. (Obviously things slithered through that first wave of cleaning like her kindergarten profile because, well, we’re awesome.) You can be the judge after reading it here.]

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The Best Homes Are People Not Places

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Happy Memorial Day, everyone! I hope you have had plenty of family time and have taken a moment to think about our freedom and remember all of the women and men who have secured it for us. That’s what it’s all about, right?

Erin is spending Memorial Day Weekend at the beach celebrating Ace’s 15th birthday. But I’m relaxing with my family close to home, going to some parties, doing some baking, and attacking some yard work. So there is no reason to skip Stasha’s Monday Listicle: 10 WORDS THAT DESCRIBE YOUR HOME. A girl can only haul so much mulch or bake so many cookies without a break. Quick word of advice, don’t let those two activities cross paths. Mulch in baked goods cannot be passed off as fiber.

Erin's Weekend

Ellen's Weekend. This is totally representative of my discovery of the snake skin shed in the holly bush I was trimming. No exaggeration.

So where to begin? Erin threw out this helpful email, “My house is known as command central.” Gee, I think we all can say that. Not really enough to work with. Even though I’m not rollicking on the beach, I have better things to do than create lists out of thin air.

Then there is the post we wrote about Erin’s Oasis and my counter post about The Coco Room Apocalypse. Quite frankly, they provided TOO much to work with. And since my house hasn’t been completely clean since I started blogging, I was in no mood to review Erin’s neat house techniques, albeit, they are very good and handy.

See? I'm sappier than I let on.

So I was going to copy from this canvas on my wall because Erin has a very similar one hanging in her house. But it seemed very precious and quite frankly, a little plagiarize-y. I mean, do I really want to stoop to ripping off the equivalent a Hallmark card? I may have a touch of the sappy, but I ooze with integrity. I’m Googling right now to see if there is an ointment for that.

But I was inspired! The Listicle asks for words describing our homes, not our houses. I was on the right track with the wall art, but I needed originality. Our homes are the people who fill our hearts and clog our septic systems, not the disorderly conditions of our stray sock baskets. And since you can’t get more one-of-a-kind than the people in our lives, I present without further ado…

The People Who Transform Our Houses Into Homes

(While the names have been changed per our kids’ requests, the personalities are all real.)

Erin’s Army first…

They are almost this funny. Wait, they ARE this funny.

1. Ace. My oldest son just turned 15 years old and is completing his freshman year in High School. He is a huge sports fan and plays soccer and runs track. Ace looks like my husband and acts like me. He can make friends with a light bulb. He is funny, impetuous, and confounding.

2. Biddie. Her blog name came to me, because my husband’s family is Polish. They used this nickname for his sister when she was younger, because she was small but mighty. That’s our Biddie. Thirteen years old, smart, creative, funny, and athletic, Biddie is everything I wish I was at her age.

3. Charlie. He is my 11 year old who loves soccer, Comic Books, and hats. I swear that he is either going to be the Frat President in college or its mascot. The kid is slightly cracked, but in the best possible way. Everybody loves him. One of the nicest compliments a teacher gave us about him was that of the 24 kids in his class, twenty-three of them considered him one of their best friends. He is our soft, sweet center.

4. Deacon. He was the one I had the hardest time renaming for the blog. His actual name is soooo perfectly him that it was hard to imagine him or referring to him any other way. Deacon is 8 years old and loves to build LEGOs, play soccer, and do science and art projects. At home, we sometimes call him The Hammer, because he has singular focus and knows what he wants.

5. Eddie. Eddie is a total Momma’s boy. My husband implied that his obsession might be a little more than your average bear (do you see where we are going with this? Oedipal Complex?). Eddie is 4 years old and loves Star Wars, stealing the iPad2 from his siblings, books, and hiking. He is stubborn, smart, and adorable—a deadly combo.

6. Steve. Last, but never least, is my husband of 15 years, Steve. When I told him that I was going to use military-inspired aliases for the blog and I thought that I might call him The Colonel (you know, because I am The General), he said, “I feel more like The Corporal.” He makes me laugh most days, and he is the most patient, kind person I have ever known. He’s the best. You are just going to have to trust me on this one.

Now Ellen’s Crew…

Don't worry, we only wear these pants on Thanksgiving..for the stretch. Oh and on Groundhog Day...for the style.

7. Frank. He is my soul mate and the best father I could imagine for our two girls. We have been together since he hit on me on that fraternity house lawn. I am blessed to have his support and love. He is sharp and witty and definitely lightens me up. I might be a smidge intense. I do have a tendency to tell him that he is lucky I don’t have an addictive personality, because he might be a bit of an enabler. But hey, he boosts my ego when Coco gets done with me.

8. Coco. So, Coco is nearly 14. I think she really picked the alias Cocoa because she loves chocolate, but I changed it to Coco because the girl has style. She is a preternatural force. She brought me to my knees as an infant with her colic and sometimes we question if the colic ever ended. She is a musician, an athlete, an actress, a writer, and a first class student. God gave her to me to keep me in my place. You should thank her too, because she keeps me from thinking that I am all that and a bag of chips. I am happy and blessed to know her.

9. Jellybean. She is 11. She is the least pleased with any of this blog stuff. She is a girl you want as your friend. She is kind, but not sappy, and definitely has a bit of the imp about her; just ask the cat. She is fun with a silly sense of humor, but has a well-defined BS meter. She is happy to be with a group, but can go and do her own thing without forcing the group to conform to her. She brings her determination to her sports, her Legos, and her schoolwork. Jellybean just gets it done. Her laugh has brought me joy from the first moment I heard it.

Hmmm…I ran out of family members. Seems like we didn’t have Monday Listicles in mind when we were squirting out kids. So number 1o is a bonus funny…

10. Antique White. This is something both of our families ~~ridicule~~ tease Erin about. She wants to paint everything in her home “Antique White,” (I know, that’s a whole different issue). She actually thinks she has painted everything “Antique White.” I, along with the entire Army and Crew, are here to tell the world, and her, once and for all: HER CHOSEN COLOR IS YELLOW!

So I guess the moral of this story is that Erin can’t suppress her sunny, positive personality with the bland and mundane, even when she tries.

Fondly, Ellen

: Booooooring Antique White or Sparkling Superfly Yellow? Which do you think fits Erin best?

Now check out the other great Listicles, although I can almost guarantee they won’t contain a flying Boohbah.

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The Softer Side of the Coco Room Apocalypse

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So, in a previous blog with Erin, I wrote about the craziness of redoing Coco’s (13) room and the havoc it struck on the rest of the house. {Coco Room Apocalypse} I now feel ready to defend, I mean explain, myself. There had been an epidemic of teenage redecorating in her class and we were one of the last to fall victim. We should have painted during the summer, but as Coco put it, “We were too busy living life.” Well, we started living the high life of cleaning and sprucing up the week of Thanksgiving. (I know, bad timing. I already acknowledged this in the other post.)

So Jellybean (11) was helping me and chatting with me as I painted. She says, “You should have known we would hate pink and purple when we were old. I’m going to save time when I have kids and paint my girls’ rooms blue to start with.”

This indeed sounded like a good idea as I was drowning hummingbirds and butterflies in Caribbean Blue. Coco, Frank, and I had already spent hours removing the trellis wallpaper border that completed the garden gazebo theme.

By the way, just don’t do wallpaper. The horror on the Home Depot clerk’s face when I began my request, “Where is the wallpaper…,” was only trumped by his relief when I ended the sentence with the word, “remover.”

Garden Gazebo Theme. Pregnancy hormones must have deluded me into thinking wallpaper border and stenciling were good ideas.

In my defense, Coco’s room was decorated 11 years ago when Jellybean overtook the nursery. Eleven years. My Coco is not so much a pack rat as a prolific creator and collector of stuff. She then tends to bury this stuff away and then promptly forget all about it. So really, she is more of a happy-go-lucky squirrel than a nasty old rat.

So due to this squirreling, I am finding a treasure trove of Coco-ness shoved in boxes, books, and under furniture. My favorite find was the foreword to her first novel crediting her sister for inspiring the title.

I could go on (there was A LOT of stuff), but the specifics of my child’s preciousness doesn’t have to be detailed here. But, it all tugged at my heartstrings. It also made me grateful that I had gotten pushed into the whole re-decorating slippery slope. (And believe me; I did not embark on this project willingly. You feel kinda attached to the dozens of pansies you lovingly hand-painted for your first born while six months pregnant with your second. Hmmm… or maybe I just felt attached in the sense that I did not feel like sanding and priming all of those suckers. I’m going to go with mother’s love over laziness, just for the sake of my next point).

So here is why I am grateful, even though I’m a little cracked from the whole snowballing project. Do you think that a surprise walk down memory lane would feel like warm nostalgia five years from now when Coco goes off to college?? No! It would feel like sucker punches! Sucker punches that could land me curled around a teddy bear longing to turn back time.

So I’m glad I didn’t have the forethought to decorate a 2 year-old’s room with her future teen self in mind. Otherwise, this massive clean-out might not have taken place until she leaped from the nest. So criticize something else, Jellybean. I’m letting Coco project HER view of self on her room and I’ve assembled a nice box of mementos that I can choose to open when I WANT that trip down memory lane.

So if you need me, I’ll be the one floating down the River “De-Nile” ignoring that Coco has 5 more years to squirrel away new landmines of preciousness for me to find.

Oh yeah, and in response to Jellybean’s pleas that her room, too, be repainted, I say, “In five years, all this can be yours.”

-Ellen

Finished product. It was worth it, right? Right!?!

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Erin’s Oasis or Is It a Mirage?

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Ellen – It is January and my house has not seen complete order since the weekend before Thanksgiving. It is bringing me down. The walls are closing in. For some reason I thought it would be a good idea to honor Coco’s request to redo her bedroom in the manner befitting a teenager. Here is the insanity: I started all this on the Monday before Thanksgiving. Get me some Haldol because I am clearly psychotic. Even before the holidays began, I started out so far behind the eight ball that I was not even in the billiard hall.

Erin–My friend Ellen is one of the smartest people I know. I am not blowing sunshine up her you-know-what, but it’s important to note this in light of this decision she made. I understand her rationale. Truly, I do. Frank had extra time off the week before Thanksgiving, so she would have help. BUUUUTTTT, if she had asked me, I might have mentioned that decluttering a teen’s room (eight bags of trash, no lie), stripping wall-paper, repainting a room, picking out a new bed, painting old furniture to match the new room, and putting the whole damn thing back together IN THE MIDDLE OF THE HOLIDAYS might be a tall order, even for her. She pulled it off, of course, and only had one meltdown much later in the holidays when Shutterfly’s site got twitchy as she was trying to finish her presents.

Ellen – Um, had more than one meltdown, but I try not to take every tantrum public. And Erin is presenting the summary of the story as seen from the end of the tunnel of hindsight. The project snowballed, people! Snow! Balled! We were just painting the room to match the comforter she got for her birthday this summer. I did not know I would be digging through the basement searching for the vanity that I remembered was left as a “gift” from the previous owners of our house, because Coco expressed interest in a $900 Pottery Barn Teen vanity. I did not know that aforementioned vanity would take 8, yes 8, cans of spray paint to cover its dried-out surfaces. I did not know that the first bed would come damaged. I didn’t know; but I should have known.

HOWEVER, I have now found a scapegoat for all of my misery, and her name is Erin. It is really Erin’s fault all of this took place in November, because she was busy dragging me and my crew all over the countryside this summer making us have fun. We should not have been splashing through waterfalls, we should have been painting!

BUT, this room project is going to be fodder for another blog because quite frankly, it is too soon. Too soon! So, what I want to talk about is how Erin keeps her zen in a house filled with 7 people, 4 of which are boys. I did ask her advice.

Erin– I am not a neat person by design. Ask my poor sister or my college roommates. I tend toward disorder and chaos, but I was holding it together. I was getting it done. The fifth kid was a game changer. Our slight shift in number represented a cosmic shift in our universe. We had become the very embodiment of the scientific concept that systems left to themselves tend towards disorder. Um, yeah, and then some. My newly super sized crew meant that I needed to learn some new skills and quick or we would be invited to star in the next episode of “Hoarders”. Cue my lovely friend, Lauri, our organized Sister. We all think she rocks. She assessed the situation and gave me advice. Proud to say that we are now clean-as-you-go converts. Occasionally, we let this golden rule slide, and things start looking like a market in Calcutta in no time flat.

The close proximity of so many people means that occasionally all you desire is to breathe your own air and listen to yourself think. To this end, we also respect that one room in the house is the Oasis. For us, it’s the master bedroom. No clutter, no mess, no dirty ugly reminders of the business taking place in the rest of the house. I can’t be the evil ogre mom and outlaw food in the family room (I LOVE popcorn with my movies!) nor do I feel like harping on every errant shoe, belt, or ball. But I will disappear into the Oasis and take a load off. I will put my head down on a well-made bed and pick up a neatly stacked book from my bedside table and drift away for a few minutes. Pure heaven.

Ellen– It is a wonderful system, but just listen to what it has spawned. Loopholes developed. The order may be a Mirage. But hey, I would settle for things looking good at a distant at this point.

Erin– So, one piece of advice was to make the beds every day. Great idea. Everything looks neat and tidy. Mental space opens up. Deep Breath and AHHHHH. Well, my peeps did not get the memo. I was violating the Dymowski Law of Inertia. They were going to resist this change in their momentum. My brilliant offspring, mostly because they are future men, have taken my edict to make beds and morphed it to their own ends. They make their beds once a week and then sleep on top of their freshly made beds with whatever blankets they can find. This is why I had to bring in the big guns. There is a genetic laziness that could threaten our happy, little home if left unchecked.

Ellen– I personally think it is an IQ test and that they passed. But clearly the Sisterhood Secret is to clean-as-you-go, because it is easier to sweep up a mole hill than to sandblast a mountain. I have used this technique, but like intense cardio, I have let it slide during the holidays. But I defy anyone to say that this technique would have succeeded against the Coco Room Apocalypse. If I can ever get to baseline again (take the Christmas decorations down) I swear I will once again clean-as -I -go.

And just in case you think I’m one of those uptight women that needs a Valium if the vacuum tracks aren’t lined up in the same direction or if you think I am using hyperbole for comedic effect; I have two words for you: photographic evidence.