My Origin Story
EPISODE 2
by Dianne Jimenez
This article takes 9 minutes to read
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My Origin Story
Hey! Welcome back. Now about this episode, being one of my first ones, I figured I’ll clue you in on a little about me and how I got started as a professional organizer.
First off, if you don’t follow me on social media yet, I’m a wife and mom of 3 of some pretty awesome, helpful and capable kids.
Don’t get me wrong, they didn’t come out like this.
They have their moments and many moments where they shine and sometimes, surprise us with fried eggs, bacon and hot coffee! But this is all recent stuff.
I’ll be taking you, way back to the beginning of my organizing story
With the thousands of parenthood books out there, videos, documentaries, life experiences, different people we’re gonna meet and stories we’ll hear and learn along the way, each kid will come out so differently into this world.
I’m a teacher at heart and love to help people discover more about themselves and their capabilities. Always looking for the silver-lining and lessons to be learned so that we come out a wiser, more aware and grateful version of ourselves.
I wasn’t always so organized. And for a good chunk of the 10+ years of being a mom, I’ve spread myself pretty thin, trying to be everywhere and doing everything – all the time. And sometimes all at once!
That’s just a disaster waiting to happen.
I also struggled for a long while with the thought of:
Is this it? Is this my life, just a mom? And when the kids are grown and doing their own thing… then what?!
Want to go from 'drowning' to peace of mind?
I knew I was meant for something more, but had no clue what? I also knew that
I didn’t want to go back to the corporate world and feel out of the loop and behind the times. Or just land a basic job that was so unfulfilling.
While all these thoughts were packed away in my head during the baby and toddler years, our house was BUSY. I look back at old pictures now, and we had A LOT OF stuff everywhere: Bins, toys, clothes, kids accessories and exersaucers, high chairs, etc.
If you have young ones, they pretty much run the roost don’t they?
We tried to keep things organized with lots of bins. And with young kids, I’ve counted well over 10 large bins just for clothes alone. Now, don’t even ask me about how many we had for their toys and books PLUS all our things we wanted to keep.
On the social front, we entertained often and we enjoyed it. While we were living most of the time in our chaos – which we weren’t even aware of, that it even WAS chaotic… because we were IN it.
I’ve had my fair share of rage cleaning the house so that it was presentable for just a couple of hours.
We entertained often. Sometimes they were planned, and other times, impromptu. So you can imagine the mental and physical demands THAT created. And I do recall asking myself one time during one of these deep rage cleaning :
How could I make this part I don’t enjoy at all, a lot easier on myself???
find out how families with 3+ kids tackle the beast: laundry!
Fast forward to the Spark Joy phenomenon of early 2019 and falling in love with Marie Kondo’s space-creating folding technique. It also sparked me to step back and observe our home environment with a more objective eye.
Curious, I went on to open other cabinets and drawers around the house. I realized that our things looked like they were just thrown in randomly with no real structure and sometimes with items that didn’t even belong in that room!
Yeah, it wasn’t pretty. And speaking of which, this observation was a couple of years after we had gutted and renovated our home.
We went from dark and gloomy to bright, airy and modern:
- The beautiful, updated cabinets and fixtures on the outside, concealed the chaos and disorder on the inside.
- The surfaces and floor were cluttered, and there was no white space. Every space in the house had SOMETHING on, in, or under it!
- The new big windows brought in the calming, natural light yet made clear the amount our eyes were processing.
It didn’t make any sense.
A calm, airy and serene feeling was desperately competing with the same old habits & decisions (or indecisions) that resulted in clutter & chaos.
My Secret Sauce For Setting The Kids Up For Success
Then I stepped back even further and looked at the big picture:
My kids are living in this chaos we created.
How did I expect them to be focused and absorb the information we’re teaching them if they’re too busy processing the environment? And, how are they expected to feel calm if they’re always stimulated?
Another thing was – if us parents are essentially their 1st teachers:
How can I be more present if I’m feeling :
- overwhelmed,
- mentally drained,
- distracted,
- short of time and patience?
(And these were just scratching the surface of my thoughts….)
Visual clutter and lack of structure are silent, yet, heavy burdens for our already busy minds.
I felt SO MUCH GUILT… and shame.
So after we binge watched the Marie Kondo series ‘Spark Joy!’ on Netflix the first day it came out. We weren’t 3 episodes in and the husband, Onnig, got up to test out her folding technique with his own clothes.
The man GAINED a full drawer and a half of SPACE.
We were floored!
I immediately set out to change our folding technique and start with the kids’ drawers. They had no structure in them. Well, I shouldn’t say ‘no structure’. I made sure the pajamas were together, socks and underwear in the same drawer, pants and sweaters at the bottom, the usual stuff.
The only thing is, the clothes themselves looked like they were just thrown in. And it’s ODD because we did fold. Either the kids got to them, or through the hustle and bustle of the days zooming by and little sleep, the drawers were all a mess. I came to realize after observing my whole house that that…
3 things to establish now before losing your s#!t later on (During The School Year)
…things just weren’t being put away after use.
We had things out in the open because it was just easier to grab despite the already-full counters. Or we had stuff that no one knew WHY we were holding on to them. They were either passed down or just THERE – because it just came with the house.
See, my husband bought the house from his grandmother so a lot of her old things were still in the house and we just kept them all. But we didn’t know what to do with them.
I could blame the clutter on lack of time, low energy, no sleep, them against us, 3 kids vs 2 adults, and everything else in the book. But it wouldn’t get us anywhere but to spiral down in this guilt and shame vortex. That’s just not helping anyone.
It was time to accept, forgive , learn and move forward.
If one of our beliefs were: “set the kids up for success“, we weren’t doing our part. We may not have had the bandwidth when they were babies. But after this eye-opener, it gave me momentum to propel us forward into making better decisions and developing helpful habits for ourselves, and in the long-run FOR THEM.
Free training: "How to find time in a busy schedule"
Shortly after, my eye-opening moment, I thought:
I might not be the ONLY parent feeling this way and concerned for what future I was painting for our kids:
If I can help another parent feel less like they’re drowning and more in control of their home life and decrease their mental load so they have time to focus on being present to teach their kids – so that THEY are off on the right foot, then… that’s a plus for my mom-mission!
And so I went to Google and found the Professional Organizers in Canada. I got trained and passed the exam to become a professional organizer and launched my company: 1 Tidy Place. A name my oldest one came up with, just like that.
The road to organizing takes time, months (even years) of observation and communication for it to work to your benefit. Meaning,
…you the parents, are gaining more and more freedom
as the structures and systems are set in place, through consistency with applying the new habits AND involving the kids throughout the process with follow ups and guidance.
Join my free community 'It's goin to be 1 Tidy Place' on facebook
Today, when you open my kids’ drawers, are the clothes all neatly placed in the perfect bento box position?
In general, yes.
They are kids after all with small hands and they’re always on the go. So placement isn’t Pinterest Perfect. But it’ll do for now AND
…tidying it all up, takes seconds as opposed to a good chunk of time of redoing the whole thing.
My role here isn’t to do it for them, but take the time we now gained, to show them and help them understand the bigger picture.
Now, living in a more organized home with growing kids and busy schedules, it doesn’t mean the counters and floors won’t be filled with stuff- it’s not a museum – nor would we want it to be that way.
The only difference now is, EVERYONE IS CAPABLE of tidying up and it doesn’t take that long to do. WANTING TO DO IT though.. is a whole other story for another day!
Now my action for you is to take a look around your house: Observe, open the drawers and cabinets and tell me in the comments below, or better yet, join my free, private Facebook group and tell me there :
Do you have a system in place?
Thank you SO much for being here. I’ll see you next week, same time-same place.
Referenced in this episode
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