He got rid of my lumps of clothes.

When Christopher and I got married I had a major goal to accomplish: to rid him of his "clothing chair." I had learned that as a single young man he had adopted a horrible tidy technique. He always kept a chair in his room devoted to clothes that had been worn, but were not in need of a good wash. Naturally, before long no chair could be seen, only an ugly pile of clothes.

As a good obsessive little wife, I told him that this was not acceptable once we were married. The first phase in this weaning process was that we would keep no extra chair in the room. And eventually, Little Miss Obsessive got her little way and the little ugly "clothing chair" was never to enter her little husband's life, and more importantly, her little obsessively organized home again.

Well, sort of....

8 1/2 years later...

When I was 9months pregnant I decided to paint my bedroom while my man was gone on a business trip. In the process of doing so, I managed to stuff so many things in the closet in addition to the many things that were already there. Of course the goal was always to reorganize the grand mess which I never did. (In fact, messes in general don't seem to go away.)

Instead, since then I've been developing and perfecting my own very well-thought out tidy technique. I call it, "clothing lumps." After a given set of clothes have outgrown their welcome on the floor near my bed and closet I lump them. What I do is, I make, cute little, OK, sometimes not-so-little lumps of clothes. The lumps can be comprised of one piece of clothing or a nice combination of several pieces. Once the lumps are formed I stuff and push them forcefully into my side of the closet. If I'm grumpy, I throw them in, to the soundtrack of my growling, huffing, puffing and complaining that I have no room, hoping they will land somewhere reachable.

Christopher was home alone for a couple of hours the other day while Penelope and I were out doing something, I don't know what. When I got home I noticed that all my lumps of clothes were gone--nowhere to be found! In fact, for my birthday he gave me a closet organizer, a phrase that I utter often while I'm putting my lumps of clothes away when I'm grumpy.

I ended up using the organizer in Penelope's room...but the plan is still not to have many more lumps of clothes until we get another organizer...I'm pretty sure Christopher has his fingers crossed.