Get'er done while the gett'in is good...

First day of school.

No tears from this horribly insensitive mother.  Do you know how long I've been waiting for this day.  Don't get me wrong; I love spending the days with my kids.  What I don't like is all the unstructured time that comes with summer.  It's great for a while.  No homework to worry about or deadlines or waking up early.  Sure, I never look forward to that.  But you should see my kitchen.  It's CLEAN!  Well, mostly.  I didn't get to the floors.  Let me show you some befores and afters:

I find it highly obscene how quickly this happens.  But when crazy, unstructured summer hits, it's sometimes hard for me to juggle the cleaning.  As soon as we've cleaned it....well, you know how it happens.  At least when school starts, I've got a couple hours of nobody messing it up.  Because I'm now a full-time student, I have to work in the cleaning in-between classes and homework (I was smart and put all my classes into two days.  Well, at least I'm working on it.).  SO, I would do some work then work on a section of the kitchen.  This was the first section completed:

I could do this!  I hurried and put in a load of laundry.

 Next it was the dishes.

That's when I moved on to checking my emails.  Don't want a cluttered in-box.  And then back to another corner of my kitchen.

FYI, a lot of the mess are things I cleaned out for the recycle bin.  And then there's the dinner reminder and pie pans drying on my cooling rack.  This corner didn't take that long to clean.

Good thing, cause I had several calls to make.  I'd rather be cleaning than making calls!

Yes, I know.  Gross!  I only had time left for one more section, so this was it.  It mostly consisted of putting things back where they belong.  With the back to school frenzy, we had note cards and crayons and pens and all sorts of school related leftovers still not put away.  Easy enough.  

I'll be moving the fruit stand, but for today, it remains here.  It was off to the dump (with a water bill, they allow one free dump a month--great sense I had a mattress that wasn't even worth freecycling AND it cleared out more clutter) and then to class.  I saved this:

for when I got back.  I did clean the clutter, but just didn't CLEAN the surfaces.  

And now I've got a clean kitchen.  Yea!

My point of this whole post (besides that I'm excited that school started) is that often we don't have big windows of available time to clean, but there's usually windows here and there.  Many of you might work from home.  How do you juggle it?  My solution is to separate your items, whatever they might be, into pocket.  Do a section, make calls, do another section, pay bills, do a section, write your blog post.  And just so you believe me that I've been doing something besides cleaning and calling:

That's it.  Just a teaser.

And because I can, here's some 1st day pictures: