#1) Have two small children. Attempt to keep them occupied at all times. Decide that you also want a semi-clean house. Commence attempting both feats at once.

#2) Register for a triathlon. Become committed to exercising. Realize that you can’t make it work during the day, so plan on going every morning at 6:00am. Realize this means you should actually get to bed before midnight most nights.

#3) Have your brother, who has lived with you for the past 11 months, move out. Help with this process.

#4) Reclaim the extra bedroom, and attempt to reorganize the entire house accordingly.

#5) Make sure this move coincides with daughter’s 4th birthday. If you can get it to overlap exactly, even better.

#6) The day after the move out, before everything is rearranged, invite some family members down to celebrate daughter’s birthday. Try to cook a meal while still moving and purging furniture, but if necessary, you can have dinner at Red Robin instead.

#7) Two days later, invite your mother-in-law AND your mother to come visit at the same time. If possible, have your mother bring her dog.

#8) Plan and execute a birthday party for daughter while both mothers are here. Make sure you invite 7 girls between the ages of 3 & 5. Have at least two drive in from out of town. Instead of hosting it at your house, do it across town… no less than 40 minutes away by car. Put at least six girls and ALL their car seats in your minivan for the trip over. Turn them loose in a kitchen to bake goodies and then eat the spoils. Drive them home and then drop each girl off at her own house, just to make the process longer.

#9) While mothers are visiting, make sure you plan other activities, such as dance class and Little Gym for them to observe.

#10) Three minutes before you are supposed to leave for Little Gym, have your toddler get into a craft box (which is sitting out because you still haven’t finished reorganizing your house before the company arrived) and get out Fuchsia Permanent Enamel paint. This works best if he can do this stealthily, because after all, there ARE three adults in the house to keep an eye on him.

#11) Have said toddler open the bottle of paint and spill it down his leg in the middle of the play room. When he realizes he’ll be in trouble, have him come looking for you, thereby tracking the fuchsia permanent enamel paint all through the hallway and then back into your bedroom.

#12) When you finally notice your toddler in all his fuchsia glory, grab him and carry him to the bathroom on the other end of the house. You can’t put him in your shower because he has a poopy diaper, so you have to take him to his bathtub. In the attempt to keep paint from getting on your clothes, make sure you touch as many surfaces in your house as possible, including (but not limited to) the walls, doorknobs and faucets. Leave paint on all of them. In the madness, forget to wipe it off right away, and let it dry for a permanent reminder of the occasion.

#13) Leave your mother at home to clean the carpets while you rush to Little Gym. Have her do one round of carpet cleaning with a barrage of carpet cleaner, club soda and a shampooer. Make sure not all of it comes out.

#14) Do a load of laundry with the rags that were used to clean up the paint. Add bleach. Spill some on your solid-colored blue shirt, creating an instant white spot and rendering the shirt unusable.

#15) On the day after your mothers leave, have a friend from out of town come stay with you for three days. Play and have fun, try to squeeze in some work outs. Stay up too late, but put off the organization project that is still in limbo.

#16) Reclaim your house and attempt to finish reorganizing. Decide you have so much stuff that you need to clean out your garage. Decide that a garage sale is in order. Schedule garage sale for the weekend after everyone has left.

#17) Instead of organizing a simple garage sale, invite your friends to come too. Now you not only get to fill your garage up with your junk, but everyone else’s too!

#18) Make sure you plan other activities in which you wouldn’t normally participate, and make sure they are scheduled for the same week as the garage sale. Include such activities as swim lessons, extra Little Gym classes, a dance recital and dress rehearsal (plan these the same days as the sale). Buy your husband tickets to a comedian he likes for Father’s Day, and make sure the performance is scheduled for the same day as the sale and the dance recital dress rehearsal.

#19) While preparing for garage sale, do extra loads of laundry. During one load, allow the cap of the laundry detergent to get knocked loose. During the spin cycle, let the vibrations of the machine knock the half-full Costco-sized bottle off the top of your machine and dump the contents on to the carpet and floor in front of your laundry closet. Don’t actually notice this until hours later when the detergent has seeped back under your machines so far that you’ll have to pull them both out to clean it up entirely.

#20) Since you have to open a new bottle of club soda to clean up the carpet, and you don’t want the rest of it to loose it’s fizz and become useless, decide that now would be a good time to do a second round of cleaning on the paint stains. Do this instead of preparing for the garage sale that’s tomorrow.

And as a special bonus for making it all the way to the end of this list:

The #1 Way to Avoid Preparing for a Garage Sale…

#1) Decide it has been way too long since you have blogged about your family, and spend the evening before the sale preparing a list of all the reasons you haven’t blogged lately. Priceless.

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