There's a bathtub under all those toys!

There's nothing like a night in a clutter-free hotel room to inspire me to clean when I get home.

Last Friday night, Jeff and I enjoyed an overnight away from the kids. We decided to splurge, renting a hotel suite with a king size bed and whirlpool. It was definitely a very nice hotel room, but as I looked around, I couldn't help but realize just how ridiculous it was for us to spend that much money to enjoy the same accomodations we have at home.

And so, Sunday was anythign but a day of rest at our house. I bought two clear plastic bins (with drainage holes), and put the kids to work.

The instructions were basic. Each kid got a basket and needed to fill it with any of their toys they wanted to keep. Anything that didn't go in a basket needed to be put away or it'd be thrown away.

I was pleasantly surprised by how well they worked together. (As long as you ignore how much time AJ wasted playing with his Spiderman snorkling mask.) See the big orange lobster scoop? I could have sworn it was AJ's, but both kids agreed it was Sydney's. Until she announced she didn't want it, and then it found a home in AJ's basket and everyone was happy.

I'm certainly no one to criticize the kids for the mess. I had piles of my own to clean: magazines, dirty clothes and even a basket of old kids' books, which I'd used to keep AJ busy when he was young. It was a set of Sesame Street books my mom had picked up at a garage sale - each book highlighted a different letter of the alphabet. AJ had loved the books when he was younger, but Sydney had never been as interested in them as her brother was. And so over the years they've collected dust and been buried under clothes and other objects I was just too lazy to put away.

AJ couldn't possibly have known I was planning to box up and donate those old books. But somehow, just as he did last spring when I was gathering treasures for a garage sale, he seemed to know the books were going away. The next thing I knew, he had gathered a stack of the books and was showing a renewed interest in them, suddenly able to read them himself.

I have a long way to go for my housekeeping skills to be next to godliness. But my new goal is to clean a new room or space each weekend day. During the week, meanwhile, I will go through a magazine a day, tearing out recipes and any other article I may decide is worth keeping, and recyling the rest.

It's an ambitious goal, and if I stick with it, I may finally see a clutter free house by the new year. But I doubt it.That's what hotel rooms are for - to enable my denial.