The 31 Days of FlyLady

Do you think starting a blog inspires one to do things that might be fun to blog and/or read about? This is not an idle question. Because having started my brand-new knitting/whatever blog yesterday, now I find myself inspired to take on a quest.

Specifically, I feel like my house is a mess. Not quite a pigsty, though some might disagree. We don't have hoarding disorders or anything, but we have never been particularly tidy people. And hubby Tim has a pretty high standard for what he's willing to bring visitors into, in terms of tidiness and cleanliness. (I have standards too, but less shame.) Things are particularly bad right now because I've been sick with a cold the last 5 days and basically doing nothing whenever I could get away with it. Being pregnant, I don't like to take much in the way of symptom-relief drugs, so I mostly sat in my closed bedroom with a humidifier going, slept when I could, and knitted and read knitting blogs when I couldn't sleep. Some of this time was also spent feeding and playing with my daughter, age 3, but Tim took up a lot of slack there. He also mostly fed the family while I was sick. Thank you, Tim!!

So, we have a lot of what FlyLady calls CHAOS going on -- that's Can't Have Anyone Over Syndrome. Ever heard of FlyLady? Back when I was first working her system a couple of years ago, I described it to friends as a sort of remedial course in basic housekeeping. Not for people who don't know how to sweep a floor, tidy a bedroom, or clean a bathroom, but for people who have a really hard time integrating those sorts of tasks into their lives on a regular basis. That's me, in spades. Maybe I'll write more on my theories about why I am this way in a later post. For today, let me just say I'm climbing back on the FlyLady train to see what I can do by taking baby steps from here (CHAOS) to there (a home I can bring people into anytime, with at most 15 minutes of picking up toys before it's presentable).

I wanted to post some "before" photos of the clutter I'm talking about here, but Tim talked me out of it. I guess inviting whatever fraction of the blogosphere eventually makes it here to view our current CHAOS was a little much for his nerves. Frankly, listening to him, I got a little paranoid myself.

So instead I'll post a photo of one part of our house that's looking decent right now, if you don't look too hard at the fingerprints on the dishwasher:



Our kitchen is, today and many days, mostly clean, sanitary, and usable. You might put fewer things on your counter, and maybe someday I'll get there too. But it serves us all right. And that's a characteristic of how we're living now: usually some areas of the home are in pretty good shape. The trick we're still working on is keeping most of the house in good shape, most of the time. Dare I hope for all of the house, most of the time? But I'm getting ahead of myself.

FlyLady has conveniently established a web page called Beginner BabySteps for people in my situation -- either just getting started, or needing to restart after not working the system for some time. It lays out 31 days of baby steps you can do in a fairly short amount of time each day to get on track.

Day 1
The mission for Day 1 is "Go Shine Your Sink." The idea is that you clean it really well once, and then briefly wipe it down at least daily after that, so it never gets visibly dirty again.

So, without further ado, here are some photos of today's work. I did the rest of backlog of dishes from when I was sick first, so I could see what the sink actually looked like. I'm still a little tired from the last of the cold, so I did it in 15-minute chunks, with 15 minutes of R&R in between. This is another trick gleaned from FlyLady experience. She's big on timers, and they do help me focus.

Here's the before photo: an old, scratched-up porcelain sink with lots of grease and other stuff mucking it up.



Here are the tools (going for relatively eco-friendly and healthy stuff, avoiding bleach and fumes for baby-on-the-way's sake): a flannel rag that used to be someone's undershorts, some creamy cleanser, and some more-abrasive stuff for the tough stains that otherwise would require bleach. Not pictured: the dish towel I dried with afterward.



I spent about 15 minutes scrubbing, rinsing, scrubbing some more, and so forth. The result: still an old, scratched-up porcelain sink, but worlds better than before.



Hooray!

The Rules...
Oh yeah, as I go along with the FlyLady Beginner BabySteps, I'm trying to get myself and the family on board by working out some rules and guidelines we can use to keep things nicer and do less crisis cleaning. Today's rule: when you're done with a dish or cooking implement, deal with it. Get it handwashed, or scraped and put in the dishwasher, before you go on to do anything else. If it really needs to soak, get it soaking. Don't put it off. I ran this one by Tim for his reaction, which was, "So, can you contrast this with what we're already doing?" Good question. Perhaps he's doing a little better on this score than I am so far. Basically, my answer was that I'd like our regular practices to be more like what we do now on a *good* day. Consistency is a big issue for us. And I think FlyLady's program, done right, will help with that. She puts a lot of thought into helping people not burn out or slip into perfectionism. And that's where this rule scares me a little: it may be too perfectionist. So I guess I need to resolve to make this my regular practice, and when I notice we're slipping, to do something a little like I try to do in meditation when my attention wanders: chuckle inwardly, say, "Gee, look at that," and then proceed to get back with the program as best I can without stressing out, SKIPPING the step of beating myself up first.

And the Knitting...
In those 15-minute R&R periods, plus some time last night, I started a new sock project. The pattern comes from Simple Socks: Plain and Fancy, by Priscilla A. Gibson-Roberts -- her basic toe-up sock pattern, sized for my foot (size 7.5) and gauge (10.25 st/in -- ouch! -- on size 1 needles for durability). The yarn is some KnitPicks Simple Stripes that was in my stash from a while ago, when I tried it and found it a little itchy. It still seems itchy, but I've had some experience in between with superwash wools softening up after washing, so I'll try at least one sock to see how it does. They aren't selling this yarn anymore; this may not bode well. But I want to do *something* while I wait for the yarn I need to finish the baby blanket to arrive. Wish me luck. And if you don't mind itchy socks, maybe I'll have sock swap material later on!