Wife, Then Mama

I am not a great housewife.  In case you somehow missed that in all the posts I have written (or not written rather) this month. But there are a couple of things that make it look like your house is cleaner than it is. Shut everything.  Your house looks a lot cleaner if the cabinets are shut.  Same goes for the shower curtain. Make your bed.  Your room instantly looks much tidier. Collect all the dirty laundry in one place.  In my house this 2 minutes of work makes both bedrooms, the bathroom and the living room look much better. Stack the dishes.  My husband actually tricks me with this one quite often and it annoys the crap out of me.  Because if you take all the dishes around the kitchen (or house if you are as bad at housewifery as I am) and stack them in and right next to the sink the kitchen looks about a thousand times cleaner, without actually doing work.  Then I am all happy cause Michael cleaned up the kitchen for me, only to fi...

Yup, its official, I CANNOT blog about things 31 days in a row.  Or even like 7 days in a row.  We can't all be good at everything right? Anyways, I have completely ignored my schedule after the first two days.  It was to much, and to early.  I have however been keeping the house fairly clean. The other day Michael even said something about it, which is either an insult (at how I usually keep house) or a compliment, but I chose to take it positively. Since my schedule was not really right for me, I went back to an old stand-by:  FlyLady Bingo.  Now I love the idea of FlyLady , but because it is about making habits and I can't seem to make good habits for the life of me, I never get very far through her baby steps .  Plus she wants me to wear my shoes in the house , which is both gross and uncomfortable.  (Hmmm, FlyLady has 31 baby steps, perhaps I will skip one and do them all next month as a challenge.  You know because I love failing...

SUCCESS!!!! While I didn't follow my schedule, my house did get cleaned! For this I thank FlyLady Bingo !  If you have issues getting your house cleaned, I HIGHLY recommend FlyLady ! My whole house got picked up, dishes were ran, vacuuming done, and ALL the laundry was washed.  Sadly, I didn't manage to fold it or put it away, but I did change my sheets. Michael is going to have Saturday and Sunday off now instead of Sunday and Monday, which will be awesome for my schedule, and in turn for my house.

Wanna know a secret?  I am totally cheating and backdating this post.  I am actually writing it at 11:56 pm on the 12 of October. Anyways, "today" was Friday, and as such it was POPCORN PARTY DAY!  I did a tiny bit better than usual, but no where near well enough. I did however eat delicious popcorn and watch Enchanted with my two favorite girls (Hadlee and Miss Baby).  So the day wasn't a wash :)

Epic.  That is the word to describe this challenge.  Epic failure anyways.  I couldn't even manage to blog everyday.  Next week I will be restarting, but with a later wake-up time.  I can't handle waking up that early, I require more sleep than my husband does apparently.  Plus he told me that if I can't get up earlier than him and make him a "real breakfast" (sausage or bacon) not to bother because he doesn't like taking cold lunches and he can pour himself a bowl of cereal.  Tomorrow I will get the house back to clean, so that next week I can get back to doing things everyday.  My mom helped me out a lot while she was here, so the house isn't destroyed or anything, but it is cluttered. So for me it will be a 21 day challenge instead of 31.  But I don't have anymore planned interruptions, so I should get back on it on Monday :)

I should really give up now, since I am obviously going to be a giant failure at the Housewifery Challenge.  But, I won't.  Because I still have 25 days to get it right.  Plus the two days that I did manage to not suck, my house looked nice, and the day went well. I just don't do well with keeping up on things when I am not home all day by myself. Today was a nice day though, and although I didn't work on my house at all, I DID help Michael with some yard work this morning after church.  Then we went and ate dinner with our friends, and went back to their house to play games and watch YouTube videos (because we are all just that cool LOL). Tomorrow I will probably suck because its my birthday, so my mom is taking me shopping.  But maybe I can manage to do something :)

That is how I feel at 7:45 am when I got up at 6 am.  I was actually pretending  to yawn, but then it turned into a real yawn so I took another picture. Despite the fact that I was asleep by 10 o'clock last night, I still was exhausted when I woke up at 6.  I was pleasantly surprised by how nice my house looked when I woke up. My morning routine went REALLY, REALLY fast, because I kind of cheated.  I didn't have to unload the dishwasher because it wasn't full until after lunch.  I didn't start the laundry because I had diapers in the laundry, and then I waited until I cleaned the bathroom to start my new load because I didn't want dirty toilet rags sitting around for very long.  And I didn't quick clean the bathrooms, because my afternoon deep clean was the bathrooms and that seemed a bit redundant.  So I finished up pretty quick. In the afternoon I was supposed to deep clean all the bathrooms, but since the cats were locked in the kid...

Today was the first day of my challenge.  And I think I did a decent job actually. Honestly I almost failed before I even started when my alarm went off at 6 am.  We had not gone to bed until after midnight, and I am someone that LOVES her sleep.  But I thought that would be pathetic to admit on my blog, so I rolled my lazy butt out of bed and made Michael breakfast and lunch. Admittedly it wasn't a great breakfast (eggs and a brownie) but he had bought brownies with the intentions of eating one for breakfast so I figured he would be pretty annoyed with me if I didn't give him one.  I was so on top of things that I even got Michael's clothes together before he got out of the shower. Then I managed to do everything on my list except start laundry, because I thought I had done all the laundry yesterday in an effort to wash my new diaper enough times to have the inserts be absorbent tonight.  Later I realized that I could wash all my winter clothes, so I star...

This is my schedule for the 31 Day challenge , in which I will be practicing my BEST housewifery skills!  This is a weekday schedule, my weekends will probably be a couple hours later, and instead of deep cleaning I will be meal planning, helping Michael outside, or being lazy. 6:00 - Wake-up and Early AM Routine (just so you know this is 1.5 to 2.5 hours earlier than I normally get up) make Michael breakfast make Michael lunch throw back the blankets unload dishwasher start laundry read Bible 7:00 - Get ready (I don't ever get ready.  I tend to wear yoga pants unless I am actually out of the house...) shower dressed hair make-up 7:45 - AM Routine make beds breakfast dishes kids ready (ironically I do get the girls ready everyday) wipe bathrooms (just a quick  swish and swipe ) switch laundry pick up upstairs 12:15 -  Early PM routine lunch dishes sweep fold/put away laundry pick up downstairs vacuum deep clean - dust, v...

Yesterday I was reading The 50s Housewife Experiment on Jen But Never Jenn  and thought I should replicate it.  Then today I was glancing at Facebook (I am supposed to be avoiding it, but failing miserably) and saw Mama Gab  talking about  Nesting Place's 31 Day Challenge .  I also realized that my blogging has been a pretty big failure lately .  My house has also been a disaster more often then it should be seeing as how I am home all day, everyday with two well-behaved little girls. So everything kind of came together at once and I am going to do the challenge!  For 31 days I will do my darnedest to follow the following rules: keep to a housekeeping schedule NOT waste time on the computer or smartphone when I should be cleaning or playing with the girls not harass my husband about his computer gaming time get ready everyday (Lori if you are reading this, maybe I won't be in my pajamas when you drop Hadlee off in the morning!) Although I hav...