Cleaning and organizing and de-cluttering! Oh my!

Hello again. I know I've been really quiet this summer and I'm sorry. I've been busy. We had our first camping trip to celebrate Thunder's and Lightning's birthday. We had so much fun and got a lot of mosquito bites to prove it. They really had it out for Hurricane, who got three bites right around his eye! His eye was swollen shut! Poor guy. He's okay now though.

 I've also been working on my FlyLady routines. This is something I struggle with. I do well with a routine, but I start to feel trapped by it and have to re-vamp it. Instead of just changing it up for a bit, I end up stopping all together. In a 3 bedroom house with 6 people that simply can not happen! The laundry monster starts to take over first, then it's the dishes, then it's the toys. Before I know it, my house looks like a tornado ran through!

FlyLady to the rescue!! When my house gets that bad, I put on my mp3 player and go to town with a crisis clean! I know she says that we should never have to crisis clean again, but I do. I am getting better though. I used to have to do a crisis clean once or twice a week, just to maintain the CHAOS (Can't have anyone over syndrome). Lately, it's been just an occasional occurrence because I've been keeping up on my daily routines.

FlyLady's baby steps start with working on your evening routine. I found this a little weird at first, but have found it's very important. My day runs a lot smoother when I wake up to a clean house. I can actually cover some ground instead of treading water all day. I still have not perfected this, but I try. Some nights I am just too tired, by the time I get all 4 kids into bed and keep them there. A while back I pinned this cleaning routine from Little Green Notebook. I love the simplicity of it. Yes, I still do the FlyLady stuff, I just like to tweak everything to my life, so I take a bit from here and a bit from there.

Anyway, I knew that I needed to start with my evening routine, so I did exactly what that chart said to do. Low and behold, the next day went smooth too! Amazing! Thank you FlyLady for the inspiration to work at it 15 minutes at a time. The time I put in today, will benefit my family tomorrow!

The morning routine is next. This is straight out of FlyLady and goes as follows:

~Eat something good for you and take your medicine and vitamins
~Feed kids (they get up as they want and eat at different times.)
~Exercise
~ Shower and get dressed to lace up shoes, fix your hair and face. ( I do NOT put shoes on most days. I am not any more productive if I have shoes on, and I'm more comfortable in bare feet.)
~Make bed
~Grab a load of laundry and start the washer
~Empty dishwasher to start your day.(If you did your evening routine, it should be full of clean dishes)
~ Check your calendar for today's activities
~What's for dinner? Get it out and in the crock-pot.
~De-clutter for 15 minutes in the FlyLady zone.
~ De-clutter mission from Home Storage Solutions.

By this point, it's close to lunch time. I'm going to have to work something out once we start homeschooling again in September since that will not work for us. I'm thinking I will have to move the bulk of these steps to an afternoon routine, so we can get our schooling done in the morning.

I do try to get more than one load of laundry done in a day. With 6 people one load a day simply will not cut it! Laundry seems to be my sticking point, no matter what I do. One day, I will be caught up. Or we will move to a nudist colony. Either one, I'm not sure. 

This is about as far as I've gotten with my routines. It's working so far and my house is about 15-30 minutes away from company worthy. No, I don't have a Better Homes and Gardens picture worthy house, but it's clean and that's all that matters.