Zone 5

Well, the sink is shiny, the dishes have been washed and unloaded, and the laundry has been washed, dried, folded AND put away (amazing). These are the things I've been working on doing every day.

However, I also added in the BabySteps of doing the Zone work. This week is Zone 5--the living room or family room. Yesterday I spent 15 minutes getting all the trash out of the living room. I pitched flyers and receipts from the tops of tables, coupons that fell into the couch, and I don't remember what else. Today, my 15 minutes was spent taking everything that didn't belong in the living room OUT. You know what--I have 3 more days to go in this Zone and already I wouldn't feel horrible if somebody came into my house right now (at least into the living room).

Tomorrow I'm going to attempt to do my House Blessing for the week. Hopefully I can do all but the sheets while Hank is sleeping. It shouldn't take me too long, if I can make that work. Now it's time for Bible, brush my teeth, and bed.

"Olympic" challenge

So, it's day 2. I have not shined my sink--yet. However, I did do a challenge that I received in my e-mail. The basic gist was five 3-minute cleaning spurts: the car, the bathroom, paper trash, tops of the washer and dryer, and one "hot spot". It's amazing what you can accomplish in 15 minutes. And it's contagious.

I asked Chris to grab and bag and pick up paper trash with me. (This is a huge issue of ours--miscellaneous mail and other papers never seem to hit the trash or recycling.) We both made stacks of the bills/paycheck stubs/etc. that needed to be shredded and he went and did that as soon as the 3 minutes were finished. I worked more than the prescribed time on my hot spot (the top of the buffet in the dining room). We have so many hot spots to fix, and I was still motivated, so I figured I would keep going. It's still not perfect, but definitely much better. We determined that it went from looking like h_ll to looking like crap. In a moment of silliness and acceptance of our true slacker natures, we high-fived over this movement up the ranks.

Baby steps... That's what I have to remember. Someday soon we won't live in total C.H.A.O.S. (if you haven't been to FlyLady yet, that's "Can't Have Anybody Over Syndrome".)

I've off to go shine my sink. =)

Sink cleaning time

All summer I've been on the web reading articles, blogs, and e-books dedicated to the domestic arts--particularly ones that focus on being a stay at home mommy. I'm not sure if this is because of the possibility that I could have my work hours cut to less than 20% of their current amount, or if I'm really wanting to be more organized, clutter-free, stress-free, etc. I knew when we got pregnant that my ideal would be to stay at home with our kiddos, but lately it's just more and more appealing.

Anyway, I stumbled across a website--no, philosophy--tonight that just may get me to get all my ducks in a row. The first thirty days of the plan are outlined for you and look super easy--that's my kind of housework. So step one is to "shine your sink". That's it. They even give detailed instructions.

The left side is done and the right side is still in the soaking process, but so far so good. Step two will be to keep it clean every day. I definitely see the merits of having a clean sink each morning when you head into the kitchen to pack lunches and make breakfast. We'll see how long I stick to this. And the blogging too.

By the way, the website is www.flylady.net. I guess this makes me a "FlyBaby". I could think of worse things.