No matter how much I determined at the beginning of every day to make things better…by the time evening rolled around and I finished dressing my freshly-bathed kid in his Winnie the Pooh jammies and reading The Monster at the End of This Book “just one more time,” nothing had changed. Well, unless you count the things that changed for the worse. I’m pretty sure those kinds of changes happened regularly.

I absolutely LOVED being a wife and a mom, and I LOVED the idea of managing our home. But I didn’t really like cleaning the bathrooms. Or doing the laundry. Or picking up the toys. Or washing the dishes 583 times a day. And even if I had liked doing those things, I couldn’t figure out how to fit them into the day and still have an ounce of time or energy leftover for surving.

And believe it or not, things didn’t get any easier once I birthed two more children (shocking, right?). I had everything I’d ever wanted – loving husband, adorable kids, comfortable house – but I felt like an absolute failure. I was constantly working and never getting anything done. I couldn’t seem to figure out how to do my mommy-thing AND keep our house from looking like a tornado threw up all over it (yes, tornados can throw up, trust me).

It was a vicious, horror-movie-worthy cycle. The less I cleaned, the more the clutter and messes piled up. And the more the messes and clutter piled up, the less I had the time to clean. Taking care of our house started to feel like digging my way out of a cave-in with a demitasse spoon. Impossible.

Then, I did something that changed E-V-E-R-Y-T-H-I-N-G. And this time, it was a change for the better.

I turned on my computer (then waited twenty-eight minutes for that bad boy to boot up – that’s how we rolled back then), and I typed up a list of all the things I needed to do every morning and a list of everything I needed to do each night to keep our home running. I typed things like “wash dishes” and “start laundry” and “give the kids a bath.” Somehow, seeing those things on a list and being able to check them off every day made it all seem so much less overwhelming.

Well, cue the fireworks and pass around the party hats. Because after those routines were born (and tweaked and practiced long enough to become daily habits), I also began tackling the bigger messes and clutter that had piled up during my years of barely hanging onto life by the skin of my teeth. I realized I had limited time and energy, so the only way to get anything done was to break it down into teeny, tiny, manageable tasks I could fit in between Elmo singing the ABC’s and one of my starving kids asking for their fifty-third snack of the day. And THAT is when the magic really started to happen. No, my house didn’t “magically” get clean. But I finally knew HOW to get our home feeling peaceful and put together, and I knew it was possible!

Did you hear that? It was possible!!! Those are some of the most beautiful words in the English language, don’t you think? No more wishing or regretting or feeling like an absolute failure. There was something I could do to make things better, and it was so easy that I ACTUALLY DID IT!!! And I’m still doing it today!

That was a lifetime ago. Literally. My oldest kid is now OLDER THAN I WAS when I sat and cried my tired little eyes out on my front porch. So, I guess I can legit say I’ve spent a lifetime practicing the art of breaking down cleaning and decluttering into bite-size tasks and using routines to keep up with all the other basics. That’s how I know I can help you, too. Not only was I able to do it – and keep doing it for all these years – but I’ve helped other women do the same thing in their homes, too.