WANTED: Straight Jacket; preferably on the newer side without any drool stains.

I'm officially losing it. Maybe I never had it? I'm having minor panic attacks just walking through the house. To outsiders, perhaps, the house itself might not look that dirty. To me, it looks like someone picked it up and shook it all around and then put it back down.

I'm in house HELL.

What has happened? I opened a drawer in the kitchen and all of a sudden, a dim bulb went on above my head. TIME TO REORGANIZE. Not just the drawer, the whole freaking house. I've got bins for this, and bins for that, trying to "keep like with like". Right-o. It's working like a charm.

I start in one area, then pass through another on my way to do something for the first area and something ENTIRELY different catches my eye, so I drop what I'm doing to focus on the new thing. ADHD much? About the only good thing to come of all this is that I think I've finally discovered some missing socks. There were 3 under my bed alone (thank you Bella), one hidden in a basket in the kids' cubbies, and a whole slew of dirty ones behind the dresser in my son's room. I have yet to locate the rest, but I think I've put a big dent in the 4,762 that were missing prior to this exercise.

I spent nearly an hour trying to avoid a simple throw-away task. I had 3 used gift bags that were still in pretty good condition just sitting on my desk. That irritating little voice in my head kept telling me to just keep them, you might use them someday. Someday??? How about never? Every single time I'm in need of a gift bag, I'm already on my way to a party anyway and have to stop to buy a gift, so I always, ALWAYS just buy the bag when I buy the gift. Wasteful, yes, I know. My family has a gene called "hoard" that I'm trying desperately to avoid. Hanging on to those three bags would surely wake that gene up from hibernate mode.

As I write, I've actually stopped "organizing" for fear of hyperventilating myself to death. I walk out of one room and into another and OH MY GOD! THE HORROR! Must get to work in here...NOW. Then I can't breathe...so I walk around aimlessly, trying to establish some sort of normal breathing pattern. It never works. Tears start to form and I walk away from the spot, completely discouraged.

Know what else? It never fails that once I get some small spot cleaned up and Felixed (READ: Odd Couple reference), there's a demon possessed child waiting right behind me. That child wreaks havoc on that one spot because it's fun, apparently, to make your mom cry and breathe heavily into a paper bag. What better way to get her out of the house and into a straight jacket?