I'm Flying!

I decided to start the FlyLady system a couple of weeks ago. As I like to say... "We are well on our way to Ramseying out of debt and now will be flying out of clutter."

In one of those stupid sorts of things, I am getting a little worried that I'm turning into my parents and should have just listened to them all along- after all, you are always warned against repeating the sins of your fathers and learning from your elders. Have I spent the last 10 years of my life (my years as an independent adult) getting into all manner of difficulty that I could have skipped if I had just swallowed my stubborn and listened. After considered thought and discussion with my husband, I was heartened to decide that this was probably not the case.

As with money, my mother also took a very hard line, somewhat extreme view towards cleaning. She did advocate some of the flylady basics of picking up after yourself regularly and wiping up the kitchen every night. However, these sensible steps were tempered by some less than manageable expectations- my mother scrubs the kitchen floor on hands and knees once a week. This is apparently a hold-over from when my brother and I were crawling about and putting everything in our mouths. While I freely admit that when my children are crawling, I see merit in the hands and knees periodic wipedown or even when your children aren't- I draw the line at continuing mouthing, crawling children standards when said children are well over driving age. In another instance, I remember her telling me about how exhausted she was but that she wouldn't be able to sleep until she had vacuumed her bedroom. Might I say that it is a rare moment that the dustbunnies who are currently hoping to be numerous enough to finally organize that fantasy football league cross my mind at bedtime, let alone prevent me from sleeping. On the other end, my mother gave up on the bathroom shower curtains sometime when I was in middle school. The get a wink and a nod every few months and then are replaced when they begin petitioning for civil liberties. You might see how this left me with little practical knowledge (hee, spell check wanted to make that piratical knowledge!) of how to manage a household.

So far, I'm in the decluttering stage. I have completed the living room and am currently working on the kitchen. I'm hoping to to get to really start cleaning next month when we rotate through the zones again. For now, I'm trying to do a consistent 15 minutes a day and hope to add a 2 minute hotspot drill in the next week or so. Ultimately, I'm hoping to manage with 10-15 minutes a day in home blessing work and 15 minutes or so of zone chores as well as a couple of fire drills morning and night. I like structure and organization which makes the flylady a good fit for me. Plus, by the end of a day more than 30 minutes seems wildly beyond my reach. I'm also hoping to be able to take weekends off, by and large, and I would really like to be able to avoid the great Saturday morning clean which had seemed inevitable. As an added bonus, I seem to be at least a touch ahead of where many people are when they start, based on her writings, so I get to fit just a tad smug at how well I've already been doing. This would be the first time I've ever gotten to feel ahead of the clean house curve.

For those wondering, neither of my previous posts had to do with my New Year's resolution which is to avoid using single-use cups- especially plastic ones.