Day Sixty - Two or To Stuff or to Spread?

Are you a stuffer? Or a spreader?

I'm a spreader. When I have a stack of papers or other items, I like to spread out with a series of specific stacks and I don't pick up the stacks until I find the perfect place. Not "a" place, mind you. "The" place. Now this worked really well when I was young and single. I was naturally an insomniac (sound like any kids you know?) and rarely slept more than four hours a night. Some nights I didn't need sleep at all. So when I embarked on such a project, I simply stayed up until the project was complete. My closets were beautiful and nothing was just lying about.

Flash forward to now. I love sleep. Need, need, need sleep. Have two children that understand the phrase, "Please don't touch, Mommy's not finished" about as much as they would if I said it in Mandarin. And, here's the kicker -- I married a stuffer!!!! So I take the time to spread out everything for sorting and if I walk away from it for more than five minutes, assuming my two kids haven't already gotten to it, he stuffs it. He stuffs it into drawers, stacks everything into one and places it "somewhere", or worse. Worse -- I found stacks on the floor of the closet -- Really? Really?

This makes me looneytoon, over the cuckoo's nest, Crazy with a capital K! See he treasures clean surfaces -- can't stand my stacks. And I can't stand stuffed drawers and not knowing where anything is. So where is the happy medium here? (Hey, if we can figure this out, maybe we can solve health care reform!)

I know that my stacks don't always look pretty (okay, rarely look pretty) but I know where things are. And I'm the one who gets up with my son and has him ready to go to school at 7:00 am. So I think I should have priority (especially today when I am frantically looking for a due library book) but he wants everything to "look" clean. To me it's not clean, it's just hidden.

So here we are -- at a stand-off. I know that time is not my friend and I appreciate that my stacks sometime stand for a while, but I can't find anything his way. Any suggestions? To spread or to stuff, that is the question.