Or keep your dining room table clear. Or sweep under your dining-room table regularly. Or make sure your dressers aren’t overstuffed with clothes so they don’t shut all the way. The point is, all of us have that one thing (or half a dozen things) that drives us crazy. Whether yours is crumbs on the counter or rooms where half the lightbulbs are burned out, taking care of your biggest crazy-makers (BEFORE they get to the point of making you crazy) sets the whole mood for the day.

For me, that one thing happens to be making my bed. I used to roll out of bed in the morning, look at the rumpled sheets and blankets and think “eh, what’s the difference? I’m just going to be messing it up again in 15 hours.” But I spend a lot of time in my bedroom, even during the day, and I found that every time I went back in, the sight of that unmade bed made me feel…slumpy. It made the house feel messy even if the house wasn’t particularly messy. It made me feel disorganized. And every time I sat on the bed (like I am now with my laptop) I would feel like crawling under the sheets and going back to sleep.

I’m far from being a neat freak, but I began to realize that I require a certain level of cleanliness in order to function. I spend most of my day in my home, and if it feels too messy or cluttered I just want to retreat and watch bad TV instead of being productive. I also realized that it pays to stay on top of mess by constantly straightening up instead of saving it all for some mythical 2-hour stretch when I’ll be able to do a big clean. So four or five years ago I started making my bed every day, as soon as I could after waking up. What a difference. It took a couple of weeks to really get into the habit, but soon I found myself looking forward to making my bed–it feels like tearing out a fresh sheet of notebook paper, clean and crisp and full of possibility. Now, no matter how the rest of the house looks, my bedroom is a neat and pleasant retreat. When I go to bed, it’s so satisfying to pull back the smooth covers instead of climbing into a tangled mess of sheets. And it really makes a big difference in my mood.

I have other “must do” chores, too. For example, I really like my bathroom to look clean (with four boys this means wiping down toilets at least daily) and it’s important to me to have a clean kitchen sink (which I realized after doing FlyLady many years ago). I also Can. Not. Stand. to have couch pillows and throw blankets all over the living room so I stop a few times a day to toss pillows back on the furniture and fold blankets. I call these things my “triggers”—I’m actually crankier to my kids and anxious when my sink is messy or there are sofa pillows on the floor. So I try to stay on top of it through the day—and it all begins with making the bed.

One note, though: I have my older kids do a lot of chores, but I almost never put them in charge of my “trigger” tasks. It’s too important to me that they’re done right–not to mention promptly.

Do you have housecleaning “triggers” that can make or break your mood? What are they? How long did it take you to figure them out?

Day 9 of the NICU, with just two more full days to go. Saturday and Sunday were the “scary” days, before we really knew what was happening. Monday and Tuesday were stressful and frustrating, as we tried to get used to this new routine and figure out exactly what Clara’s diagnosis will mean for us. Wednesday through now have been mostly just…boring. There’s not a whole lot to do in a hospital, and Clara can’t go anywhere. If we were at home, I’d be up and about a bit by now, toting Clara around as I helped my boys with their homework or did the dishes or ate. But I can’t bring food into her room, there’s no bathroom in the unit, and I can’t really sleep in here. Many of the things I have to do in order to stay alive have to occur outside of Clara’s little world. While I’m with her, all there is to do is sit in a recliner and wait for her to wake up. (Though watching her sleep has a fascination all its own. She’s awfully cute, and smiles in her sleep more than any of my other babies. Like this:

Maybe it’s the phenobarbital).

Because of all the waiting (and the fact that Clara still sleeps away most of her days) I’ve actually had quite a bit more time on my hands this week than I generally experience as a mom of many, so I’ve been reading a lot. Today I finished a book my sister brought me called This Is Not Chick Lit. It’s a collection of short stories by emerging and well-known women authors, and it is one of the best compilations of short fiction I’ve read in the last several years. The stories are alternately funny and heartbreaking, with a couple downright odd ones thrown in for good measure. Definitely good for new-mom reading, as many of the stories are short enough to finish in one marathon nursing session or while trapped under a sleeping baby in a plastic recliner in an NICU all day while machines beep all around you. Or, you know, while you’re hanging out on your couch at home. Good read either way.

I also thoroughly enjoyed this essay at Literary Mama by writer Barbara G.S. Hagerty, about how mothering her four children, rather than hindering her from writing, has enhanced and maybe even bettered her writing. An excerpt:

From time to time I fantasized what my life would be like if I did not have the responsibilities and encumbrances of a family. What if I did not have to cook meals for six on a daily basis, settle sibling disputes, sit through long games in the gymnasium, call out vocabulary on flash cards, or find someone else’s missing shoe or lost jacket at 6:30 a.m.? What if each day were a luxurious tabula rasa on which to paint words, eat a carton of yogurt for dinner, sleep whenever, read for hours at a stretch, talk to fellow artists, daydream, or entice the muse? What would it be like to be able to call one’s time wholly one’s own?

Oh, yes. I find myself doing that, too. If only I had hours and hours each week to myself, I catch myself thinking, I’d have finished that novel long ago instead of adding a chapter or two each year, when I happen to have time and am in the mood. Or, I tell myself, I’d dabble in playwriting or poetry, things right now I don’t feel I have the brain space to explore at all. But she goes on:

To my surprise, I found that I missed — ached for — the messy complications of life, the interruptions, and the human encumbrances. In a word, I missed my family. I’d underestimated the ballast that they were in my life; I’d not understood how they enhanced, rather than subtracted from my work; I’d not realized that through being part of a family, I had fundamentally changed.

Yes yes and yes. Motherhood limits and reconstructs my time–absolutely–but when I had endless amounts of time, I can’t say I was a better or more productive writer, student, worker, or human being. Kids have anchored me and given me both fodder for my work and a sense of urgency about getting it done. I can no longer delude myself with the idea that I’ll have all week to finish that story, so what’s the hurry? Now I know that a moment of quiet or a nap time must be seized and used while it lasts. And I actually have something to write about, something that goes beyond my narrow little view of the world and my own self-interest. Perhaps I’d have grown out of that self-interest either way, but in my case, having kids definitely bumped me in the right direction.

Another thing I’ve noticed is that I have a stronger need to write now than I used to. Writing is my work, and it keeps me sane amid diapers and feedings and squabbling kids. But when I was untethered, I didn’t need to write to keep sane. I could also spend my days shopping or watching daytime TV or laying around gabbing with friends…all time-sucking distractions that kept me from writing. Now I look forward to finding snippets of time to write, and when they come, I am grateful for them and jump on them. Even now, while in the midst of a hospital floor and at the tail end of a pretty traumatic experience, I’m finding ways to fit in writing. It’s not the best writing I’ve ever done, clouded by a touch of sleep deprivation and a general brain fog…but it’s something. How could I stop? This–the balance of mothering of and writing, of typing away while nursing a baby or thinking up snippets of prose or article ideas while I’m changing a diaper–is just what I do. There have been times I’ve felt guilty, like I’m not giving mothering my full attention; but then I realized it’s just the opposite. Keeping my mind working makes me a better, happier, less frustrated and likely more interesting mom. Caring for my kids makes me a more efficient, and in many ways more empathetic, writer.

If you’re a writer and a mom, has motherhood changed the way you write for better or worse?

I’ve always been a magazine lover, so I have a funny way of internalizing whatever the catchphrase of the day is. For example, when I was a teenager, I was quite well-versed in the concept of “quality time”–a popular parenting term at the time–from reading my stepmom’s issues of Ladies Home Journal and Redbook.

Lots of other faddish magazine terms have made their way in and out of my consciousness since then. For a while, “gams” were “glam”, and when it came to new shades of shadow, the “eyes” always “had it”. As I moved into parenting mags I became aware of “tummy time”, “mommy wars” and “cry-it-out”. But above all the rest, one word in particular has managed to endure over the last decade or so, infiltrating all kinds of publications from parenting mags to women’s mags and beyond.

Balance.

We’re supposed to aim for balance by penciling “me time” into our day-planners (sorry, was that a really antiquated reference there? I meant “plugging me-time into our personal digital assistants…”) scheduling date nights with our spouses, pursuing our passions, simplifying our lives by purging and hiring experts to help us…

I don’t know about you, but to me this “achieving balance” thing sounds kind of like a lot of work.

Don’t get me wrong, I think balance is a great thing. And overall, it’s important to me that my kids, my work, and myself each get enough attention. I’m just not sure if “a balanced life” is possible for a mom, especially a mom of young children, to achieve. And I wonder if it actually adds to all the stress and guilt and “shoulds” moms sometimes feel when they are faced with the (inevitable) truth that their life is out of balance.

I can’t control my kids (not really) or the weather. I can’t control how much my editor loves or hates the story I just turned in and when she may require a revision. I can’t control checks going missing in the mail or my transmission blowing up on the toll road. So the best-laid plans to get my butt to yoga class sometimes get thwarted by a virus or a flat tire, the day I planned to spend with my kids is postponed because of an unexpected last-minute work need, the morning I planned to spend reading is interrupted by a kid who woke up earlier than I expected, or the date I planned with my husband gets canceled because he has to work late or the babysitter cancels. All I can control in any of those situations is my reaction and outlook. And if I let any one of those very very likely scenarios wreck my sense of balance, then the balanced life I thought I had created was really pretty superficial.

Some days I work 2 hours, then blow off the afternoon to go to the children’s museum with the boys (ahem-yesterday-ahem). Some days I work 10 hours, use the TV as a sitter a little more than I should, and toss a little steamed broccoli alongside the ramen noodles so I don’t feel like a total loser mom. Some days everything goes haywire and nothing gets done at all, for me, or anyone else for that matter. And some days, things just fall into place and we float through the day with the perfect balance of my needs, the kids’ needs, and the needs of the rest of the world being met.

Thing is, it’s not always possible to predict ahead of time which days will be which. There’s just no way to plan out balance on a day-to-day basis.

As authors Devra Renner and Aviva Pflock of Parentopia say, “Balance is BS”. Since something will always come up to tip the scales–leaving Mom feeling inadequate if she’s too hung up on the idea of balance–it’s not really an attainable goal, they point out. Instead, Devra and Aviva recommend giving yourself permission to adjust priorities as necessary, whether you need to do that monthly, daily, or even moment-to-moment.

So instead of balance, I personally aim for flexibility. It won’t sort my life into neat, equal compartments, but it helps ME feel in-balance even when my life is out of balance. (As it pretty much always is, for all the reasons I stated above.) Flexibility might mean deciding at noon that it’s time to knock off work for the rest of the day and enjoy some time with the kids. Or it may mean deciding that today, this deadline really needs my attention more, and not feeling guilty about a temporary lack of focused attention on the kids. It may mean deciding at the last minute that I really need an hour to myself at the bookstore or coffee shop, even if I already had an hour to myself earlier or let the boys play too many video games so I could work, just because I really want to. Or it may mean deciding to skip an outing I’d been planning because I’d just rather hang out with the kids or because they seem to really need it. Like Devra and Aviva said, it’s all about deciding which need has priority in the moment, and making a decision based on that.

If I allow myself the flexibility to make those decisions in the moment without feeling mom-guilt or its equally-evil cousin, “I-should-be-paying-more-attention-to-my-own-needs-guilt”, or any kind of should or regret at all, a funny thing happens. My life is still just as chaotic and unpredictable as ever, but in the midst of it all, I feel strangely…well…balanced.

What about you? Do you go for the “wing it in the moment” approach? Or do you believe it’s possible to balance your life…and if so, why aren’t you on Oprah making millions?

How to make four chilly boys happy:

How to make their mother happy: Go read my latest Chicago Moms Blog post, “Can You Afford Not To Shop Local?”

When I’m talking to expectant moms, often they share that they feel overwhelmed by all the information out there. What products they need to have, which products are better than others, which are safest. How they should feed and diaper and clothe and put their babies down for a nap, and all the factual and anecdotal arguments for one method or another. And, of course, since they’re all facing the ultimate unknown–labor and birth as first-time moms–just how, where, and with whom they should give birth to their babies. And expecting moms, especially first-time moms, can easily get very wrapped up in those decisions…not only because they worry about what their choices will mean for their child, but also what their choices will say about them as mothers. Sometimes, that last part is what really confuses us.

When our babies are little we only have a relatively small handful of choices to make about their care: what will they eat? Where will they sleep? What will we put on their butts? What “stuff” will we buy them? It’s easy to find ourselves putting more stock in the answers to those questions than we might need to. Of course, it’s important to be informed, but often, the choice that comes to us first–the one that feels rightest in our guts–is really the right one. Doing too much follow-up research can just cause us to second-guess our instincts and lead us away from what our intuition tells us is the right choice for us. It also leads to us spending way too much money to buy way too much unnecessary stuff, because once you’ve figured out the eating, sleeping, and butt-covering part (more or less), what other choices are there to be made beyond “what to buy?”

Let’s face it–there’s no way, in today’s information-overloaded world, that we can do everything right–or at least, whatever today’s version of “right” is. Most of us are already aware of the really important messages: you know, like “put your baby in a car seat when you drive him somewhere”, and “don’t dangle your baby out a third-story window a la Michael Jackson”. With most of the rest of it, there’s enough gray area that some research is necessary to make an informed decision. But at some point, we all have to be able to feel good about a decision and move on.

After all, as I’m sure I’ll be finding out soon enough, feeding, diapering and sleeping decisions are a cakewalk compared with teaching kids about sex, drugs, and alcohol. Pregnancy and new motherhood is the perfect opportunity to practice making decisions with confidence and then moving on.

How do you deal with the onslaught of data and opinions that come with parenting in the Information Age?

“Scwatch my back, mama.”

My two-almost-three-year old, Owen, has developed a taste for having his back scratched lately, and several–okay, at least a dozen–times a day he comes to me for a good fingernail rub. It’s hard to resist a curly-headed little boy with his shirt pulled up, so I usually give him a good scratch and then try to go on with my day.

Except that Owen is insatiable. I go in for a smooch and he covers me with kisses. I give him a hug and he clings to my neck for a half-hour. Give him a quick scratch and try to move on with your day? Well, next thing you know I have a teary-eyed little boy looking piteously up at me, saying “Pwease, mom? More?” And I’m a total sucker for cute, teary-eyed boys who can’t pronounce their “L’s” yet…so I scratch away.

But I still have a household to run, deadlines to meet and other kids to care for. So, as many moms do when they’ve got a lot on their plates, I’ve started multi-tasking my way through back scratches. I’ll scratch his back with one hand while talking on the phone, surfing the web, helping a big sibling with homework or flipping through a magazine with the other. Once I even rinsed dishes in the sink with one hand while scratching his back with the other, as he stood on a chair next to me. (The kid is resourceful.)

Tonight was like many other nights. Owen came into my room for a pre-bedtime snuggle, and after a while, started asking for his regular back scratch. I obliged, but my thoughts were on other things: a blog post I wanted to read, the e-mail I needed to check. So while he lay on his tummy next to me, I scratched away with one hand and surfed the ‘net with the other. Of course, it was annoying. Because I was facing forward, the arm I was using to scratch him was contorted and uncomfortable. And you can’t surf nearly as fast with one hand as with two.

So I made a split-second choice to focus my energy. Turning toward Owen, I put both hands on his back and began to scratch: big, swirling scratches, light, raking scratches. He sighed and sank into the pillow. From the side of his face, I watched his eyelashes flutter down toward his cheeks. I noticed the smoothness of his babyish skin, the curls on the back of his neck. After a few minutes, he was fast asleep, and I’d lulled myself into a kind of trance.

I don’t know if it felt better for Owen to have two hands on his back rather than just the one. But it felt better for me. Turning my full attention to something that I’d been lately regarding as just another routine drag on my time and energy, I got to enjoy the simple, but profound pleasure of physical contact with a little person I love (not to mention the meditative feeling I got from scratch-scratch-scratching away and watching him drift off to sleep).

Am I writing off multi-tasking forever? Nope. With four children, a household to run and a busy career there are plenty of times that I simply must do more than one thing at the same time. And hey…I’m pretty good at it. But the two-handed back scratch served as a gentle reminder that every now and then, it’s important to lay down a few of the balls I’m juggling, turn my attention to one task, and approach it with intention and focus. Not because I’m a martyr or feel like you have to sacrifice every moment of free time for your kids. I’m not, and I don’t. And not just because focusing is better for my children, though I think you could certainly argue that it is. Turning the multi-task switch to “off” every now and then is better for me. When I make a point of tuning into one task or need at a time when possible, I feel calmer, more satisfied, and more connected to the people in my family and the rythyms of my household.

Which, of course, will make the next time I need to juggle eight things at once just a little bit more bearable.