Look! It's October!

Yup, it only took me until the middle of the month to come back on. The weather has been fantastic but I think the biggest and best change has been for the last month and a half I have been keeping up with the housework!

I remember doing this before ... I even Blogged it but I don't mention FLYlady. The FLY in FLYlady stand for Finally Loving Yourself and is the basis of a Housework organization system that is free and comes with a good support system of other women that are having the same trouble with keeping on top of things. Last time I was working on this I got the menu planning down and have been on top of that for 4 years and it works great. We average $200/week for food for 2 adults, 3 children, 2 cats and 2 dogs. However that was the only this that stuck.

Flash forward 4 years to a few months ago. I was miserable, feeling martyred and just generally unhappy. While Mom was living with us she took care of the main floor of the house so I had gotten a bit spoiled. Then *poof* my cleaning fairy was gone and I had to do it myself again. Okay not again because I wasn't really doing the housework before she came - I did a lot of not doing my housework and a whole lot of feeling worthless because doing the housework was my JOB and it was the only job I had ever really wanted. Yet there I was not doing it and when I did it I was angry and resentful about having to do it - how crazy is that?

So a month and a half ago I Googled FLYlady again and started over. Step one: Shine your sink. I committed myself to keeping the sink shiny. In my mind that meant committing myself to keeping the dishes done. I said "Even if all I do this week is keep the sink shiny and the dishes done up it will be more than I'm doing now." This time when I did that it stuck - I felt so good about keeping the kitchen tidy(because you know that clean sink turned into a clean counter and so on ...) that I went to work on the rest of the baby step on the FLYlady site. I pulled out my old control journal and wrote out a Morning and Before Bed routine. Another few days went by and I hit a week of keeping the laundry under control ... unheard of! Every morning I can say by 7:30am "My laundry is done!".

Somehow over the last month and a half I have found the mental switch in my head that made me miserable while I was doing housework and switched it OFF. Now when I finish each chore I feel accomplished and happy. Housework may not be fun but I am doing it out of love now rather than out of anger and how everything looks almost all the time is all the payback I need for the work I am doing.

I have a rather long Morning routine but I have time in that routine to sit and relax. My Morning routine goes from 6am to 9:30am and pretty much gets everything done that needs to be done all right at the beginning of the day. I can then relax until I need to make lunch for the kids. Each weekday I focus on one area or task and on weekends all I have to do is my daily routines and no other extras. This set up has left me with lots of down time and keeps the house looking great all the time - it's almost effortless!

The one exception to keeping on top of things has been the litter boxes - the cats each have one. For the last couple of years I have been using a litter called Feline Pine - it's made of compressed pine pellets and absorbs the cat pee and turns into sawdust, any solid waste can be scooped and flushed and when all the pellets have expanded you can compost it. I love environmentally friendly litters but I hate dumping and refilling the litter boxes and I never kept after the solid waste no matter how may time I said I would this time every time I changed the boxes. So I've switched litters and moved my scooping chore to in the mornings when I am close to each litter box. The new litter is made out of corn, clumps and is flushable. I'll get both solid and liquid waste and I should get to it everyday now.

Once this last task is incorporated into my daily routine all I have to do then is maintain this level for another month and a half. Why that long exactly? Well my reason is that at no time in the past have I kept after the housework for longer than 2 months - after about a month and a half I tend to fizzle out and end up doing a whole lot of nothing again. Then after a while of that I get upset and angry all over again - You see the problem?

So I'll check in in a month and a half and let you know how it's going.

Cass :)