sarahmichelef

I forgot to post yesterday... we were very busy with the usual Sunday stuff plus cranky_dragon and her hubby came by for a bit to visit because they were in the area plus the whole defense scheduling kerfluffle.

So for day 27 we were supposed to plan what was for dinner in advance.  Not a problem, we pretty much have to do that what with the hungrymonster in the house.

And today we are asked to eat good food, drink our water, and get enough rest.  Working on it.  Working on it.

Today we are supposed to add a "swish and swipe" to our morning routine.  "Swish and swipe" is a quickie bathroom cleaning.  The idea is to do it to the "main" bathroom every day.  And here comes a question... what is the main bathroom.  More fundamentally, what is the purpose of FlyLady - she tells us that we're doing it to make the bathroom ready for anyone.  The whole thing is founded on the idea of CHAOS (Can't Have Anyone Over Syndrome).  But, honestly, my goal is to have the house neat and orderly for myself and my family.  So do I swish and swipe the upstairs bathroom, or the downstairs one?  (OK, really, what I'm probably going to do is S&S both.)

"Nothing says I love you more than clean underwear!"

Not sure I agree with that one, but the task for today is to add laundry to your daily routines.   FlyLady suggests a load a day - which to me is a waste of resources.  The three of us do not make enough dirty clothes to justify a sorted load a day.  But I have been making it a point to do a load as soon as there's a full basket, and I like that method much better than "laundry day" when you have to devote and entire afternoon/evening to being a slave to the washer and dryer.  And part of my evening routine is to fold and put away any laundry that's been done during the day.

Today is going to be a three-load day because I gotta get things washed so that tomorrow night I can pack for our trip to DC.  Which also means that I'll be folding and putting away during Studio 60.

Today we are to make a bedtime and stick to it.  I do this already - I'm almost always upstairs by 11 and asleep shortly after 11:30 (when Sex & the City is over).  I need my beauty rest, dammit, and with TRex waking before 7 everyday (and anyway, M has to be up at 6:45 to make it out the door to the bus at 7:35), it's necessary.

Back at home, back to it. Today we are supposed to "pick one of Kelly's Missions and do it". Today it's either to clean the back and sides of the toilet or to go through the Product in the laundry room.  I'm choosing the latter, since when I cleaned the whole house a couple of weeks ago, it included the sides of the toilets so they're not too gross.

I was also skeptical of the "weekly home blessing hour" (and we won't even get into an examination of the rhetoric of THAT ONE!). Could I really give my whole house a superficial cleaning in an hour?  The answer, it turns out, is yes.  In 30 minutes, I did a cursory vacuuming of the basement and the living room, swept the kitchen, entryway, and hall, dusted a bit, gave each bathroom a once-over with a sponge, and did the lunch dishes.  I didn't do anything upstairs because TRex was howling in her bed the whole time (instead of napping).  I'll do the vacuuming up there tomorrow.  I had wiped down the kitchen counters earlier in the day while TRex was drawing at her little table.  While I wouldn't say I've been a total cleaning perfectionist (that title I reserve for the mom I saw on Surviving Motherhood who was a SAHM to 3 toddlers and wiped her bathrooms down with disinfecting wipes THREE TIMES A DAY) but I have thought it silly to do a half-assed job of things.  I see the logic though - keeping things moderately clean makes the "detail cleaning" much less onerous when it does need to be done.

Today we learn to declutter.  We are instructed to add a 5-minute room rescue to our morning routine.  For me, it's more feasible to add this to my afternoon/making dinner routine - there's ALWAYS a period of five minutes when I don't have to do anything with dinner and M and TRex are off somewhere playing together.  I think I'm going to tackle the dining room (aka, dumping ground) first, and my project for today (while M and TRex are off at the polls, because he's taking her with him) is going to be to disassemble the Ugly Brown Thing so that it can go out with the trash on Thursday.  It shouldn't be too hard to take apart, since it's been falling apart for months.

Today's job is to pick out our clothes for tomorrow.  So when I go upstairs to shower and go to bed, I'll set out stuff for tomorrow.  Pas de problem.

Tomorrow we start the Control Journal.  I've kind of already done this, so tomorrow I'll look through the more detailed stuff about putting together the Control Journal.  Some of what she suggests I know I'm not going to do - it's not going to be my planner, for example, nor am I going to use it to store office supplies.  But I will keep a 3-ring binder in the kitchen for writing down things like the routines, the cleaning schedule, and holiday planning stuff.

So there you have it.

Coat closet = clean. All non-boot shoes have been moved upstairs to where they actually belong, random sweaters of TRex's that had ended up in there are now in her closet, and the floor is clean.

And I took down the stupid stick-up air freshener that was in there. (There is at least one in EVERY ROOM OF THE HOUSE. I've been slowly pulling them down when a particular one irritates me so much that I can't take it anymore.)

For Day 3 of Beginner Baby Steps, Flylady tells us to do what we've been doing. Get dressed to shoes (or, in my case, a pair of old clogs that function as my slippers, because I'd rather not tramp around the house in my boots), shine the sink, read Flylady reminder e-mails for 2 minutes (hard to avoid, there's so many of them), and to read something from the website.

This morning when I got up my sink was shiny but not empty, but it wasn't my fault. M had some chocolate peanut butter cream pie last night and had put his dirty plate in the sink. :^( We'll have to come up with a method for what to do with dirty dishes when the dishwasher is full of clean ones (it was still drying when I went to bed last night).

So I'm up and I'm dressed in a shirt without printing on it (embroidered logos don't count, right, especially when they're on a shirt with a collar?), and clean jeans. My "morning routine" is going to largely be shifted to the evening - shower, etc. That makes our morning much easier with M getting up and dressed, getting TRex up and dressed, etc.

For my "assigned reading" I read about "Zone Cleaning".   This is what I've tried in the past to do - come up with a schedule for what gets cleaned on each day.  But I'd never been able to stick to it.  I like the idea of doing more than one day in a room - honestly, I think that if I can get into a routine of basic cleaning on a daily basis then the rooms don't need a DEEP CLEAN any more than every couple of weeks.

So there you have it.  Tomorrow's thing is to write all of these things down on a Post-It.

How can I not like a system that involves Post-Its?  I mean, really.

OK, until someone objects, I'm going to post this stuff publicly.

Flylady Day 1 task is to shine your kitchen sink.  I was skeptical... can you really make a plastic kitchen sink shine?  Plastic can't shine, can it?

Guess what folks, plastic can shine.  Maybe not as much as ceramic or stainless steel, but DAMN my kitchen sink is gleaming.  (An hour's soak in hot bleach water, a scrub with baking soda, and then a "cleaning" with standard cleanser, and then dried.  I think the dry is the key to the shine.)

So there you have it.