Ready or not, summer is coming!

For those of us with school aged kids, our homes are about to be over run with young people who will undoubtedly be bored within an hour of eating breakfast yet will have every surface of our houses littered with remnants of their activities.

Wanna prep your house to avoid the summer long, kid clutter induced cleaning frenzies? Do you want to spend less time overwhelmed by the mess and more time enjoying the company of your children? How about we spend 30 days in May playing a little game of our own? It’s formally known as The Minimalism Game.

It’s a simple game, with simple rules. If you can read the date on the calendar, you can play this game! Here’s a little video from The Minimalists with some basics about the game.

Here’s how it works:

1. Make the decision that you want less clutter in your home before the final bell rings declaring the school year over.
2. Come over to the Yellow Cottage Living FB page and tell us you’re planning to play along.
3. Every day, for the first 30 days of May, declutter the number of items that corresponds with the day of the month. (May 1 – 1 item, May 2 – 2 items, May 3 – 3 items…….May 30 – 30 items)
4. Designate a bin or box to place the items you are removing from your house.
5. Win prizes by commenting on the daily May Minimalist Game posts on the Yellow Cottage Living FB page.
6. On May 31st, you’ll wake up with 465 less items in your home!

The items you declutter are all up to you! Since summer is peering its little forehead over the horizon, you may want to think about subtracting toys from the toy bin. I really believe that kids play more freely when they have fewer options! Kids get just as overwhelmed by choices and clutter as we do.

I’ll offer some suggestions of places in your home where you might be able to declutter some items as we go along. It’ll be smooth sailing for the first few days, but once we get into the 20’s we’ll have to get more creative and dig deep!

You ready? Game on!