Day 5 (august 30, 2009)

So, I am still working on photographing areas of my house.  Because of the weekend, I haven't been able to devote as much time to this as I was hoping. ( 4 kids and a Husband take up a lot of weekend time, in a very wonderful way.) My other plan of attack is to go room by room with a notebook and write down areas of the room I need to focus on in either a daily, weekly or monthly way.  While I know this is time consuming, I would really like to get a good handle on what needs to be done, then I would like to create some sort of schedule.  ( I will post the schedule once I get it typed out).  The thing I realize about myself is that once I have a plan, I can start to focus. 

The other realization I have made is that no matter how much I do to get this house organized, if the kids and hubby aren't a part of the plan, it will never stay organized.  Definitely family meeting time.  This summer when I had all 4 kids home everyday, I started something called "8 minutes of cleaning".  I would set the timer for 8 minutes and the kids and I would rush around and clean as much of the living room/playroom/kitchen as we could in 8 minutes.  When the timer went off, we were done, regardless of what was left to do.  But here's the thing, after 8 minutes, we had pretty much picked up the entire front of the house.  Why 8 minutes? Well, everytime I would say to the kids "Ok, it's time to clean up" they would moan about how long it was going to take and how hard it was to clean.  So I thought that if they knew there was a set amount of time devoted to the cleaning, then they wouldn't feel overwhelmed, and 8 minutes sounded like so much less then 10 or 15 minutes.  And that is how "8 minutes of cleaning" was born.  ( I may or may not have snuck over to the timer and added a couple extra minutes every once in awhile, but whatever... :)

The final idea I have had recently is still simmering in my little brain, but here is what I have come up with so far.  As we all know it is so much easier to clean when you have company.  For example, pretty much everytime I talk to my sister in Seattle, I do my dishes.  It's gotten to the point where I think "I need to do dishes, I'll call Annie."  This got me thinking about other areas of my housekeeping where I could use somebody to talk to.  Laundry for example.  What if I had a friend who agreed that every monday morning we would talk on the phone from 9-9:30, and just plan on having a bunch of laundry to fold while on the phone.  Imagine how much nicer it would be to do such a mundane task together.  I bet the time would fly and the laundry would get folded instead of sitting, clean, in the laundry basket all week.  Again, this is just an idea, but I think I'll ask around and see who wants to be my laundry folding buddy ;)

Dear Jesus,
I feel like I have a lot of ideas but no set plans, please help me to see them through and to maintain the momentum that I have built.  Help me most of all to continue to be faithful in my quiet time with you. I love you Lord, Amen.