Can you follow the FLY lady routine with pre-schoolers?

[2pt4kids]

Is it something I could do around a 3 year old and a baby? or is it more suited to people with older children?
I'm interested and would like to try it as I struggle to keep on top of the house.
I find myself just doing the same things over and over again (cleaning the kitchen floor of dropped food, tidying up toy mess, washing bottles etc) and never having time to clean the bathrooms or change the beds, ending up spending a day of my weekend doing it!
Would FLY help me?

[Countingthegreyhairs]

Hi 2pt4kids

I'm not the most accomplished flyer but I think the system IS v. good when you have pre-schoolers, because it is based on the theory of doing a little bit at a time on a very regular basis. And the thing I found most difficult post-dc is not having large blocks of uninterrupted time in which to do things. And as life with pre-schoolers is based on a loose routine anyway (play, feed, sleep etc) Flying does fit in well.

As the Flylady website says, once you have finished the babys-steps to establish the routines, you then can adapt them to suit yourself.

I posted this last week on the main Flylady thread here about cleaning with dd:

"Got through lots of my list yesterday -still some to finish. Inspired by Flylady and this thread, I discovered a great way of cleaning with dd (5):

1. Wrote out a list of the five rooms we had to tackle (deliberately included bathroom that didn't need alot doing to it - as incentive).

1. Got kitchen timers for both of us

1. Did 10 mins frantic cleaning and tidying in each room accompanied by loud music (and lots of falsely excited exclamations from me to the tune of "oooh, I hope we'll beat the clock") Great excitement when timer goes off!

1. When we did beat the clock, wrote a big tick and a smile by that room in list

1. When we didn't finish - drew a smile + recycling arrow to indicate we would come back

Kept it all moving along and fun and I WAS AMAZED by how much got done and that dd was engaged too. OK so it's not perfect, going to repeat the exercise today, but the whole house was in a considerably better state than when I started ...

Sorry for essay but I really struggle with keeping dd entertained and getting stuff done and I was really surprised by how well this worked. Normally I would give in to my perfectionist tendencies and either not doing anything if I couldn't do it all perfectly resulting in horrible tip, or do it so well that I couldn't face it next time, ditto.

So thanks all ....am converted"

Believe me, I am a hopeless case and Flying is helping me to keep on top of things much better than I used to

Good luck