Monday, April 28, 2008

Mothers rule and flylady.

As all you regular visitors here know, I have been working on a Mother's rule and Flylady to help me make our house a bit less cluttered and the house work more manageable.

I started putting together a control journal. In my journal, I have written up my morning routine, our home school program, afternoon routine, my zone cleaning routines, a how to do oamc, a one page calender for the month that has all our bills written in their due date, what we will eat for tea that night and any unusual appointments that we don't do regularly. I have taken on Lynn's and Sarah's idea and I am planing on decluttering, beautifying and deep cleaning a room each month. The plan is written up in the control journal and I am also using Flylady's monthly inspection idea to help me write a list for each room.

The other thing I want to put in the control journal is a write up of each area that Holly speaks about in her Mother's rule book. For those of you that are not familiar with Holly's writings, she speaks about the five area's we need to look after as a mother.

The five area's are:

1. Person
2. Partner
3. Parent
4. Provider
5. Prayer.

So far, I have prayed and talked with Steve about the person and partner.

1. Person: I am trying to eat a better diet and drink less coke (one of my all time favourites). I am drinking more water because I am not drinking so much coke. Our meals are much better since I am doing the oamc so that has become a bit part of our routines. I am also making an effort to spend more time in personal prayer and getting to daily mass.

2. Partner. Having young children and teenage children in the house makes it hard for Steve and I to get time alone. We also haven't been praying together as much as we should. We have started to make an effort to go out for a coffee or a meal at least once a fortnight. During the holiday's we went out twice. Once out for tea and on the weekend we went out for coffee. We are also making a bit more of an effort to pray 5 decades of the rosary together each day.

Any other people out there put together any control journal or mothers rule? I would love to hear your ideas in the comment box.

Therese

4 comments:

Adrienne said...

When I put together my control journal I had to tweak the rooms a bit. My dining room is so easy that I joined it up with another room. Each house is different and it may take a few weeks to get your zones worked out.

I also found that after about 2 to 3 months of doing fly lady I no longer had the "deep clean" problem. Sometimes I felt like I was cleaning stuff that was clean because nothing is allowed to get really bad. It becomes fun to just quickly swish a cleaning cloth over the shelves of the medicine cabinet rather than have to spend an hour because it became so nasty.

I just read Peter Walsh's "It's All Too Much re: decluttering.
Started in the kitchen and actually filled two huge boxes with stuff. How many roasters or baking pans does one person need?

I have some fun orginazation sites I visit and one idea I really liked was to pretend you were going to make a long distance move - in two weeks. Now that will change how you approach de-cluttering:)

Believe it or not my husband is way worse about just stuffing things and not getting rid of stuff. He is finally on board with the de-cluttering (his office is a horror) mainly 'cause I threatened divorce or death or some such thing. Worked like a charm.

Tanya said...

Hi Therese,
I read A Mother's Rule of Life a couple of years ago and loved it! I really like the focus on prayer, making that priority and then building other activities around that. (At least, that's how I remember it.) Years ago I used to have a schedule for all of us that I made on Excel. I don't really feel I need to do that anymore, but it was useful for me at the time. What works best for me for now is making a to-do list every night for the next day (while looking at my calendar) and then crossing off things as they get done. I use a small, spiral notepad for that, and carry it in my purse if I go out. I think it's great you and Steve are getting more couple time. I really need that with Andy, and it's been harder since we moved to PA and no longer have a built-in babysitter. Last night, we fed the kids & had them go to bed early, ordered chicken wings and watched a movie in the basement. That was nice and felt like a date. :-)

I look forward to reading more about your progress!

Therese said...

Hi Blondie,

Prayer is very much the focus of a mrol. I have worked out my routines by putting prayer in first and then working our day around these times.

Our ideal day will have me praying a morning offering first thing in the morning, the rosary while the children are having a morning break, the Angelus at lunch time and a thanks giving prayer with the children when our home school program is finished.

I would like to put the chaplet of Divine Mercy at 3pm but I am generally driving then to pick up the children.

Adrienne, my control journal keeps getting tweaked too. I have changed quite a few things as far as the zones go. I am finding the rooms that have been cleaned out (only two so far) are not needing a deep clean as much as the others. I have pretty well decided that until I have gone through all rooms and decluttered them, I am just leaving them until they are on my monthly list to clean out.

Therese

Anonymous said...

I have been working on my control journal too. My main progress has simply been that the kitchen is usually clean and tidy and the bathrooms and toilets usually are too.

We are rarely more than 15 minutes from being "visitor ready" (except the kids rooms, which are still a bit of a disaster!!)

I still have a LOT of decluttering to do.

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