Must stay the course!

Dear Cat,

I'm slipping a bit. The thrill of having a constantly clean house has started to wear off. Of course, this is the hardest part of developing any new habit, isn't it? The stage that comes after the first part where you're walking on sunshine, glowing in your success, convinced that this is the start of a new life and a new you because after all, you're doing so well at . . . (fill in the blank).

Then the glow starts to leave and all you've got to motivate you to keep going is habit, but because it hasn't been three to four weeks yet, the habit isn't yet developed, which means that all you've got to motivate you is the sheer knowledge that you really, really must keep going. And soon items begin to gather, little bits of clutter start to resurface, you aren't quite as vigilant about snatching up every little thing you see that's out of place . . .

No.

No!

This time it's going to stick. This time the house is going to stay constantly clean.

And so at this time, I'm going to end this blog post and go do a quick but vital home-touchup.

Cheers!

PS: The call from the law office was a wrong number.

PPS: Taking all the boys' toys away has stopped them from throwing the toys all over their playroom. Only now they've started pulling all my books off of the bookshelves. That's such persistent behavior that I've started to wonder if there's some cognitive stage of development which mandates that kids pull things off of shelves. Spatial-sense development? Organizational-sense development? I tend to believe that kids don't do things deliberately to be destructive. They do things because their brains are telling them that they need to do it. I wonder what cognitive developmental need is being fulfilled by the rampant book-pulling.