Homemaking 101

I must have missed this class in High School! LOL. But I am advancing to the head of the class now. As my FIL would say, I have been doing a lot of "figuring" lately and am now beginning to see the fruits of all this thinking. I've created a general weekly agenda, a weekly menu, and a cleaning routine (still polishing this one - no pun intended) to get things done around here. It feels so much better to have direction. From talking to my other mommy friends, there are so many of us - Thinking Perfectionists - out there. We spend so much time "thinking" that we get exhausted before we even do any thing. And because we are perfectionists, we only want to do things perfectly, anything less is never good enough. We become immobilized. So, then we end up procrastinating because what's the point of doing a task if we can't get it done perfectly? So, we end up thinking some more and we end up exhausted from all our thinking without much to show for it. Whew! And what is the reason that we can't do a task perfectly - oh, I don't know - could it be a little one that needs our love and attention - probably!

There are so many books and ideas out there to get you organized - I know b/c I've read so many of them and learned a great deal. So, I've taken the elements that will work for me and made my own organizational routine. For example, I was doing FLY Lady for a few months, but then fell off that wagon. I don't have it in me to do a little cleaning every day. I work better with blocks of time. And truthfully, besides the daily tidying up, I don't want to be cleaning every day. I'd rather be enjoying my family. The best thing, though, that I learned from FLY Lady is that you don't have to do a cleaning taks perfectly to still bless your home. What a freeing thought! So, tonight was the first night that I implemented the new Sully-White cleaning ritual. My dear husband agreed to take Isabella for 1.5 hours while I got down to business. OK - so it ended up taking me a total of 2 hours (cleaning 2 bathrooms, vaccuming all 3 floors of whole house including stairwells, cleaning kitchen, washing floors, and general tidying). If you were paying close attention, I did not get to dusting in the 2 hours. So for next Monday, the goal is to complete the same tasks and get to the dusting in the 2 hour time limit. I hope to get faster as I get used to the new routine. For now, I am enjoying my ultra clean home because come the morning, it won't be perfect forever.

Once I figure out how to post my templates, I will do that in case they might work for you!