Getting it together: Days 3 to 6

Just thought I’d check in and let you know how I’m doing.  The answer is, I’m doing great!  Here are my missions for the past 4 days:

• Going to Big Tent and reading messages
• Looking at our posted reminders in the kitchen and bathroom
• Recognizing the negative voices and changing them so you can FLY!
• Put out your Hot Spot for two minutes. Just pick one!

A couple of things.  I don’t do the post-it note thing.  And I didn’t really work on my “negative voices” that are apparently telling me that I don’t deserve a clean house, because my negative voices don’t tell me that.  I’m more of a “I don’t Feeeeeel like it.  You know what I do feel like doing?  STAR WARS, forevah!”  I do read the messages on Big Tent, and I have been picking away at my Hot Spots, known to me as “Scary Piles.”  This week’s “zone” is the kitchen, so I’ve been mainly concentrating on that, and trusting that I will get to the rest of the house in time.

The two biggest mental adjustments are the idea that you quickly get things done, without worrying if it is perfect, and also doing thing regularly *before* they need doing.  These two things are huge for me, and they go hand in hand.

Before this, my house would be messy and clean in cycles.  I would take a day each week, and clean the house from one end to the other.  I would be exhausted by the end, but the house would be clean!  For about 10 minutes.  Then it would slowly degrade, and go back to being messy.  And then I would clean again.

With this system, I don’t wait to clean until it’s messy.  I do a quick going over of an already clean thing, but I do it every day, so it never gets the chance to get messy.  I take an hour a day, instead of taking one day a week.

Let’s take shining the sink for an example.  Previously, I would only clean the sink when it was dirty.  Like, so filthy, I would feel weird about washing dishes in it.  Since it was so filthy, it would take some amount of effort, scrubbing away, trying to get it perfectly clean.  So the next time it got dirty, I would put off cleaning it until it really needed it because it was such an effort to clean.  Now that I’m getting into the habit of shining the sink every single night, whether it needs it or not, it takes seconds.  I can quickly give it a good shine, and not be too fussy over it, because it’s pretty much still shiny from the night before.  Because it IS so simple and easy, I am less likely to avoid it, or put it off.

And guys, my kitchen looks fabulous.  A far cry from what it looked like a week ago.  So far, so good.

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Getting it together: Days 1 and 2

I am working my way through FlyLady’s 31 Beginner BabySteps for the month of March, to improve my standard of living and state of mind.  Care to join me?

My first mission was to shine my sink.  This proved more difficult than it seemed.  My sink was full of dishes, recycling that needed washing, and food caught in the drain.  So in order to shine my sink, I also had to unload and load the dishwasher, clean the food out of the drain, and wash the piles and piles of recycling that had been piling up for the past week.  Fine.  However, yesterday happened to also be my grocery shopping day.  In order to fit all of the new food, I had to remove the old, rotting food and their containers from the fridge.  My washing load suddenly doubled, and now my counters were also covered in rotting food.  Oh, and then I found that my dishwasher was already filled with dirty dishes, so that had to be run before I could unload and load it with the dirty dishes that were piled up on my counter.  This is why I need help.  My sink wasn’t available for shining until around 7:30pm, and to do it according to FlyLady’s instructions, it involved soaking it in a mixture of water and bleach (bleach that I had to pick up at the grocery store, because I’ve never owned a bottle of bleach before) for an hour.  I have a double sink, so I had to do each separately.  Long story short, my sink wasn’t shiny until 10:30pm.  But it was totally worth it.

Behold my shiny sink, and tremble!

See the clean dish cloth and towel placed neatly on the sink, as per FlyLady’s instructions?  I had to buy those too.

My charge for today was, upon waking up, to wash myself, and “get dressed to shoes.”  Now, I’m going to have to take issue with the shoes thing.  I understand that in some regions, wearing shoes in your house is considered normal, and to not wear shoes is considered uncouth.  Well, in my neck of the woods, it is the opposite.  I have never worn shoes in the house.  To the point where just thinking about wearing shoes in the house, even if they were specifically designated indoor shoes, makes me ultra uncomfortable.  Plus they make unwelcome “CLOMP-CLOMP” noises when the Boy is trying to nap.  So I’m afraid I’m just going to have to say “No” on the shoes thing.  However, I did have a shower this morning, but only after the children had been fed, and I had a cup of tea.  And I got dressed, with a clean shirt, and a bra and everything.

And before you say it, yes I am patting myself on the back for showering and dressing myself.  I think, sometimes, I…was not built to exist in society.