I HATE LAUNDRY!!!!!

I don't know about any of you but I will confess.....I HATE doing laundry. I just need to vent for a minute. When I was single I could get all my laundry in one day and kept it under control for a week or so. When I first got married it was just about the same....I could spend one day doing laundry and feel accomplished that I had completed our laundry for the week.

Now having me, a husband, and two kids it just never seems to be completely done. I ALWAYS have a load in the washer, a load drying in the dryer, a couple of piles of clean clothes that need to be put away and of course there is always a pile of dirty clothes in our room and each of the kids rooms and occasionally a pile in the bathroom.

The laundry seems to be never ending. I am OK with getting the clothes washed and dried, it's the putting away I seem to have a huge problem with. It just seems so discouraging because every time I turn around the dirty clothes piles seems to be multiplying and replenishing more work for me to do!!! ARRRGHHH..go away dirty clothes!!!!!

Does anyone have any good laundry tips on how to stay on top of things?? Or do any of you feel my pain?? I would love to hear what you all have say about this matter!!!!

Not doing anything

Rachel went down for a nap at around 9 o'clock this morning. I went down with her.

While I was falling asleep I noticed that I was berating myself for not getting anything done, so I quickly snapped myself out of that and told myself,

"You got up, did the dishes, put in a load of laundry, played with the baby, ate breakfast, switched the laundry over and put in another load...that's not nothing."

And then I promptly fell asleep. That felt good.

I think I tell myself that I don't do enough a lot. I think that's because I often don't feel like I accomplish much on the days when all I do is hold the baby and rinse out soiled clothes over and over and over again.

Most days I'm pretty good, but some days I just can't seem to motivate myself.

Since most of my time is devoted to mommy-things, I can't spend a big chunk of time everyday making my house immaculate so I need a cleaning schedule that takes like an hour, tops, but still leaves my house clean enough that I can stand it.

I tried FlyLady, but that didn't work for me. I just couldn't fly and felt guilt about not wearing shoes. (I hate shoes). Ad I can't stand the emails. Ugh.

The other day I happened upon Real Simple and I think it's more my style. Granted, their cleaning schedule is adapted from FlyLady...but I think it will work for me better.

So I'm adapting my cleaning schedule from an adapted version of FlyLady. I think that's ok.

Perhaps I like Real Simple better because it's nerdy, whereas FlyLady is cutesy. Real Simple has a Periodic Table of Cleaning, which I happen to find hilarious. FlyLady has a little house fairy, which I happen to think is lame (although when Rachel is old enough to want to please the house fairy I probably won't think it's quite so lame anymore).

Anyway...there you have it. Hopefully I'll be dedicated enough to get my house in order.

My Cleaning Schelude

I like Abra's idea on having a cleaning schedule. I did this at one point in my life before I had kids and it worked out pretty well for me and I wanted to do it again so what better time then now, a new year's cleaning resolution. This is what I am going to try to do:

Mondays: Mop entry way & kitchen, vacuum stairs

Tuesdays: Clean kitchen (this includes counters, sinks, microwave, oven, & cleaning the fridge)

Wednesdays: Dust downstairs & clean/straighten our bedrooms

Thursdays: Bathrooms

Fridays: Organize something, a drawer, the hall closet, the linen closet, the garage, a cupboard, basically anything I feel that needs organizing at the time.

Oh and I have to vacuum downstairs & sweep the entry way everyday. Hopefully by posting this I will actually stick to it!!!!

How I fold my onesies

Before Rachel was born, I washed a lot of her clothes. Most of her clothes are hand-me-downs from my sister's twins, bestowed upon me in giant garbage bags. They were mixed and mingled with little fistfuls of grass and cookies, courtesy of the twins, I'm sure. They needed to be washed.

So I washed all the itty bitty items, all billion and one socks, every little onesie. When they came out of the dryer, I was in ecstasy folding baby clothes and imagining what our little baby was going to be like.

The million and one socks got stuck inside bigger items I had in the wash and I was picking them out of my t-shirts for weeks. I learned quickly and bought a mesh bag with a zipper. We wash and dry her socks in that now. None get lost in my pant legs anymore.

What I couldn't figure out, for the life of me, was how to fold a onesie. For months I experimented with different techniques, none of which seemed to work. I folded them, I rolled them, but mostly I ended up just shoving them in her drawers. It was rather frustrating for me.

Then Rachel got to a very awkward stage in her growth where she was either too big or too small for all of her clothes. I was forcing her just-born onesies to stretch over her not-so-just-born self in order to keep her from tumbling right out of her clothes. I had 3 0-3 month onesies and it took Rachel about 2 hours to go through that many onesies back in the day.

And so I borrowed some onesies from Kim, which I do need to round up and return. When Kim gave them to me they looked pristine--not a wrinkle in sight! They were folded simply in half at the tummy and stacked on top of each other. I was amazed!

That's what I do now--I fold them in half and stack them in Rachel's dresser. It makes them easy to riffle through, although I'm not sure that they look quite as elegant as Kim's folding job. (I may just have to bust out my iron before returning those onesies, Kim!)

Did anyone else have that same problem, or I am the only onesie-folding challenged among us?

Because I just did this

My house is, by no means, clean. In fact...it is rather cluttered and messy. I'm working on it, alright!

I read a quote on the Richards' fridge when we were staying at their house. I liked it a lot. It says,

"Dull women have immaculate houses."

By definition then, I'm not dull. But I do try to do little things to keep my house neater.

For example, I somehow picked up the habit of dusting with old dryer sheets. Nothing big. Just on my way to the trash can I'll dust off a picture frame or part of the baseboards on the wall or the top of a door frame.

Dryer sheets apparently help keep dust from settling so I guess it's a good habit--at any rate it temporarily keeps a little part of my house less dusty.

I just finished folding the laundry and dusted the baseboard in the corner of our room by the garbage can. Now it looks pretty.