Dear Jen,
Every time I think about how your baby was born on his due date that was the same due date for Gavin which was also the day he was born, I cannot get over the awesomeness.
Seriously, I just cannot.
Love, Jacqui
ps I don't think I have ever been so excited about someone else having a baby before! Maybe it's because this time I had the advanced pleasure of having my own baby to love these past couple months and I'm just so excited for you to enjoy your own little guy too! It must be like when I was a kid and I would get so excited for other people's birthdays I'd get sick to my stomach. True story. Anyway, hope you're getting lots of support so you can really love it!
Thursday 13 September 2012
Tuesday 4 September 2012
Fly Lady
Dear Jen,
I have come upon a new and exciting idea, and I thought I'd better write it down somewhere, so I have selected here.
Yes you should feel honoured.
Okay so this morning, at some random point of thinking about who knows what, a solution to my house tidiness problem came to me. It's actually a slightly more complex problem than that. The other component to it is that I've started feeling a little bad about how many days we spend just hanging around the house. Wednesdays we go to the park, and Tuesdays we go grocery shopping. Aside from that, I will on occasion take the children to the library, and actually starting probably next week I think Maggie's Place playgroups will be started up again. But anyway, probably too many days we lounge around, eat a slow breakfast, take a long bath, and I fret about the filthiness of the house, tidying here and there until suddenly it's lunch, and then naps, and then we're practically at supper and the day is virtually over.
So do you remember how this one time you lent me that Fly Lady book? I'll bet you thought I was horribly offended by it and never picked it up except to angrily peruse and then hand it back, didn't you? How wrong you were! She's got some good ideas! I'll admit, I mostly skimmed, and skipped over the parts I thought didn't apply to me--like, I am capable of cleaning my house, and I do clean my kitchen on a regular basis, and I don't get so depressed I can barely pull myself out of bed, and I am moderately acceptably skilled at motivating myself to tidy, you know. There are also a few things in her system that I already naturally do--like wiping out the sink. But I read enough to get the gist of what her system is, and I applied one or two things right away: remember my room basket? I had this wicker basket in my livingroom whose entire purpose was to deposit mess that would be dealt with later. It was actually a very effective tool for that space. Doesn't work so well for this very broken up space, however.
Anyway, the other things I picked up from the book I stored somewhere in the back of my brain as interesting information I felt didn't apply to me at the time.
SO, that information turned out to be the root of my epiphany. I am experimenting on a new system and I am very excited about it! Just started an hour ago. In a few weeks I'll let you know how it went. Here it is: Every day just after Gavin goes down for his nap I'll put the timer on for ten minutes, and do a quick tidy of the whole main floor. Then after supper we'll start doing our "After Supper Cleaner Upper" again, and that will finish up whatever I didn't manage in the afternoon. Hopefully it will create this beautiful cycle of general tidiness, in which the afternoon clean up makes it so there isn't too much to do in the evening, and the evening tidy makes it so that I can actually get most of the mess cleaned up in just ten minutes. And hopefully all of this makes it so that there is no need to look around at my house in the morning and think, "Guess this is going to be a stay at home and tidy up day", and instead I can think, "Nothing to do here--what can the kids and I do together this morning?" Extra bonus I just thought of: the more mornings we spend out of the house, the less mess there is to deal with in the afternoon!
See how it all could work together symbiotically to create a CLEAN environment forever after? See how this system, if it is successful, could revolutionize my life???
I'm kind of pretty stinking excited about it.
Doesn't solve the upstairs, or the playroom, and doesn't clean my bathrooms, but lately I've been having trouble ever getting to those issues because I'm too tied up spending the entire day tidying this stinking house (side note: I mean "stinking" in terms of an expression of my disgust, not "stinking" in terms of actual smell), so this should actually improve that situation too.
So just an hour ago to kick it off I did a special extra clean up. I gave myself ten minutes per room and did the kitchen (which I cheated to about 17 minutes), the dining room, and the living room. It was encouragingly successful. And in about an hour's time I'll have another ten minutes to do a bit more, and let the fun begin!
Be excited for me. I'm just dying for this to actually work out.
Love Jacqui
I have come upon a new and exciting idea, and I thought I'd better write it down somewhere, so I have selected here.
Yes you should feel honoured.
Okay so this morning, at some random point of thinking about who knows what, a solution to my house tidiness problem came to me. It's actually a slightly more complex problem than that. The other component to it is that I've started feeling a little bad about how many days we spend just hanging around the house. Wednesdays we go to the park, and Tuesdays we go grocery shopping. Aside from that, I will on occasion take the children to the library, and actually starting probably next week I think Maggie's Place playgroups will be started up again. But anyway, probably too many days we lounge around, eat a slow breakfast, take a long bath, and I fret about the filthiness of the house, tidying here and there until suddenly it's lunch, and then naps, and then we're practically at supper and the day is virtually over.
So do you remember how this one time you lent me that Fly Lady book? I'll bet you thought I was horribly offended by it and never picked it up except to angrily peruse and then hand it back, didn't you? How wrong you were! She's got some good ideas! I'll admit, I mostly skimmed, and skipped over the parts I thought didn't apply to me--like, I am capable of cleaning my house, and I do clean my kitchen on a regular basis, and I don't get so depressed I can barely pull myself out of bed, and I am moderately acceptably skilled at motivating myself to tidy, you know. There are also a few things in her system that I already naturally do--like wiping out the sink. But I read enough to get the gist of what her system is, and I applied one or two things right away: remember my room basket? I had this wicker basket in my livingroom whose entire purpose was to deposit mess that would be dealt with later. It was actually a very effective tool for that space. Doesn't work so well for this very broken up space, however.
Anyway, the other things I picked up from the book I stored somewhere in the back of my brain as interesting information I felt didn't apply to me at the time.
SO, that information turned out to be the root of my epiphany. I am experimenting on a new system and I am very excited about it! Just started an hour ago. In a few weeks I'll let you know how it went. Here it is: Every day just after Gavin goes down for his nap I'll put the timer on for ten minutes, and do a quick tidy of the whole main floor. Then after supper we'll start doing our "After Supper Cleaner Upper" again, and that will finish up whatever I didn't manage in the afternoon. Hopefully it will create this beautiful cycle of general tidiness, in which the afternoon clean up makes it so there isn't too much to do in the evening, and the evening tidy makes it so that I can actually get most of the mess cleaned up in just ten minutes. And hopefully all of this makes it so that there is no need to look around at my house in the morning and think, "Guess this is going to be a stay at home and tidy up day", and instead I can think, "Nothing to do here--what can the kids and I do together this morning?" Extra bonus I just thought of: the more mornings we spend out of the house, the less mess there is to deal with in the afternoon!
See how it all could work together symbiotically to create a CLEAN environment forever after? See how this system, if it is successful, could revolutionize my life???
I'm kind of pretty stinking excited about it.
Doesn't solve the upstairs, or the playroom, and doesn't clean my bathrooms, but lately I've been having trouble ever getting to those issues because I'm too tied up spending the entire day tidying this stinking house (side note: I mean "stinking" in terms of an expression of my disgust, not "stinking" in terms of actual smell), so this should actually improve that situation too.
So just an hour ago to kick it off I did a special extra clean up. I gave myself ten minutes per room and did the kitchen (which I cheated to about 17 minutes), the dining room, and the living room. It was encouragingly successful. And in about an hour's time I'll have another ten minutes to do a bit more, and let the fun begin!
Be excited for me. I'm just dying for this to actually work out.
Love Jacqui
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)