How do you manage your time???

[sb34]

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Now you really are making me feel very anally retentive. I can't stand a messy house. There I've said it - My names prufrock and I'm a cleanaholic
I do have a cleaner, but I spring clean a room at atime every so often. I have been known to scrub the grouting in the bathroom tiles with a toothbrush, and used two of my best eyeshadow brushes to get the paint lines exactly straight at the edges of my skirting boards. Everynight dd's toys are put away in her room. My clothes are ordered by season and type of item, my CD and tape collectiosn are alpabetised and I clean out my kitchen cupboards at least twice a year. I once went back to my parents and started cleaning my Mums kitchen walls - 2 days later I finished redecorating the whole room.

Having said that, dd is only 6 months, and dh is equally fastidious, and I do have all my cleaning and ironing done, and I get very little sleep.

Does anybody know where I can go to get professional help

Ooh,come to my house, prufrock!!! I will help you! (slowly....)

You will be OK in a few months Prufrock - just wait till that baby starts to crawl andd walk - then you will really find out what mess is.....

Prufrock my dp would like your address and to know whether you're single. He's never forgiven me for my nesting instinct which consisted of ironing a few babygro's. He feels let down because my friend scrubbed the house from top to bottom and was on her hands and knees washing the kitchen floor with a cloth tied to her belly when she had her nesting instinct. Sorry but life is too short for cleaning properly. I don't mind a messy house and I do have to have my kitchen floor clean but that's it. I can think of far better things to do.

Don't Java, that's what I'm dreading. Practically the only thing that has upset me throughout my entire pregnancy/motherhood has been my white sofas slowly tuning grey. And next weekend we haev to remove the glass coffee table

I'm with whoever said they were a slut - me too. Blimey Prufrock, do come and stay sometime I wouldn't want to get on my hands and knees on my floor jac34, it's generally quite grubby and I dread to think what I'd find at child level. In fact ds says "we always find loads of things we didn't know we had when we tidy up don't we mummy?" He finds tidying quite exciting for this reason! I like living in sort of organised chaos. As long as the kitchen doesn't poison us and we're happy what the heck? My top tips if anyone's interested in my slutty ways:

Don't iron, ever.
Put things in a pile and they don't look so bad (magazine mountains etc). Quite often if you leave them they get overtaken by events and you can just chuck them a few weeks later. I do write on a wall calendar for important stuff though.
Open the post once a week and deal with it then.
Don't answer the phone if you know you haven't got time to talk to anyone anyway.
Get one room vaguely habitable and stay there if it gets too much. Do another when you can be bothered.
Blitz clean once every six months, only do cupboards etc once a year.
bubble bath means you don't have to clean the bath really, just rinse it.
Most things in my house fall into the category of a) rubbish - old newspapers, wastepaper etc, b)Washing up like cups and glasses around the house or c) dirty washing so I go round with binliners for a) and c) and ask ds to collect all the washing up. That makes quite a difference in just half an hour.

Um, anyway, that's how I manage my time While I was away for 3 days at the weekend dp cleaned the whole house though so it's better than usual atm. Marvelous, will have to do it more often...

Prufrock - over time my standards have been eroded, and I now stress less about stuff (mainly food) being dropped on the sofa/carpet. Have decided to buy new carpet and covers when DS2 (15 months) is older.
At the moment he is perfecting the technique of storing food in his mouth for long periods of time and lulling me into a false sense of security so that I let him out of his high chair. Sometime later he will open his mouth and a cascade of chewed apple, chicken nugget or similar will fall onto the carpet. He will then stand on it before I have a chance to clear it up. This has the double benefit of grinding it into the carpet and spreading it around. I could go on, but I'm breaking it to you gently.

I despair of my kitchen floor Megg. Whatever I do its always dirty. And DH must have even noticed because last week he wiped down the base boards. This week he's taken a baby wipe to the bottoms of the door frames in the kitchen/utility.

BTW I have decided to only buy baby wipes - I figured that if they will clean DS' bottom they will clean just about anything and they are much cheaper than Dettox or whatever.

sorry, prufrock, but java is right!

i used to get very uptight about the state of the house when i was on maternity leave, and tbh, a tidy as you go policy combined with supportive dh plus weekly cleaner, it was relatively easy to keep everything in good order.

when they start to make their own mess, run round the kitchen smearing the lovely chrome and glass with hummous encrusted fingers, start using their spare outfit every single day at nursery because they always fall over in the mud... oh yes and give up daytime sleep, so there's less time to do anything uninterrupted...

but don't despair - the key is ruthless prioritisation, short bursts of directed activity, and lists, and it is still possible for me to be on the right side of sanity and the house not to be a pit.

i knocked myself out in late pregnancy and for the first year of ds's life trying to have everything perfect. the lesson i have learned is that i don't think such efforts are sustainable in the long run, without making oneself ill.

sorry, that is probably not what you wanted to hear, is it? but i have found a relatively small amount of compromise has had quite a beneficial effect - and this is from a perfectionist who absolutely hates to lower her standards.

maybe there is a certain type of person attracted to gf after all!

that's just a joke, please, please, please can we not have another gf thread?

Carrier bags - lots of the things - that's my answer...
Always seem to have loads of the damn things left over from the shopping anyway, and Tesco Direct home delivery send the stuff in billions of bags (SOO wasteful)...
I always keep a few stashed in drawers/cupboards in various places around the house and then 'fill them' in the odd 5-10 minutes or so..

• a bagful of rubbish (empty upstairs/bathroom wastebins) to take downstairs
• a bagful of anything broken/don't use/really don't need (e.g. makeup/ old toiletries/holey tights/ misc 'junk' )
• bagfuls to take to charity shops (then leave in lobby/boot of car for next trip to town)
• bag of papers/ cardboard for recycling
• bag of bottles/jrs for bottle bank
• bag of magazines for doctors surgery
• bag of odds & sods for DS1's nursery for 'junk modelling' ETC ETC Mind you - it can get a bit confusing with all these bags around... (Does this make me a BagLady rather than a FlyLady ? )

I despair of my kitchen floor Megg. Whatever I do its always dirty. And DH must have even noticed because last week he wiped down the base boards. This week he's taken a baby wipe to the bottoms of the door frames in the kitchen/utility.

BTW I have decided to only buy baby wipes - I figured that if they will clean DS' bottom they will clean just about anything and they are much cheaper than Dettox or whatever.

Sorry didn't mean to repost.

I used to do the 'cleaning bathroom with toothbrush' thing before DS and almost bought a venetian blind duster.

Life has since changed drastically..

rarely make the bed in the morning.
usually forget to remove make-up as rarely wear it
Don't have blinds, pin up sheets to the window.
cupboards don't have handles so don't close them in fear of never getting them open again.
Either wash up every hour or only once a day.
Don't iron
Don't hoover.
Don't share a common language with cleaner (yes, I do have one and still a mess).
Don't look sexy and inviting for DH at bedtime (or anytime).
Don't have friends.

My current ambitions:

Sleep uninterrupted for 8 hours per night.
Have 15 minutes per day staring at ceiling or blue sky without guilt.
Get through pregnancy with healthy child and moan less.

Hope you find the above inspiring...

One of the things Mumsnet has taught me is that housework can never be as important as playing with your child and I am much happier for it.

You're all going to hate me but I think I am the fly lady! I checked out her site all excited to think I might discover revolutionary new ways of keeping on top of my 'home exec job' - only to find I do nearly all of that stuff anyway! I'd like to think I'm not quite so anal and I don't have written lists (who has time to be writing stuff down when you could be doing it!) but maybe I am!
You can tidy up while playing too. I think that as long as you clear up after one activity before starting on the next then it doesn't all mount up into a huge effort at the end of the day. We have baskets and plastic tubs in our house and alot of toys are kept in these so you just throw say the farm or the cars or tea set back into its relevant tub and it takes all of 10 seconds.
Anyway, now I've made myself universally loathed I'll buzz off to do more "flying"!!

Things I do to try and keep on top of things:

Always make the bed in the morning, its so lovely to be able to flop into a lovely clean made-up one at the end of the day.

Always do a load of washing and drying before going to bed, also tidy kitchen and put out breakfast things. Find dd1's clothes for nursery, put out my own clothes for next day.

Recycle as much as possible - if nothing else it means all newspapers and empty bottles/detergent bottles etc are stored in the boot of the car!

Be ruthless about throwing stuff out/recycling. The less stuff you have, the less mess you have

Oh, and always use a timer for really boring jobs. I give myself 15 minutes to blitz the sitting room and tv room, when the timer goes off I have to stop. It's that deadline mentality!

enid, come on now, you really ARE the fly-lady!!

I read the website and nearly threw up (sorry!!)
Do flyladies have jobs?
Do flyladies have partners with functioning arms and legs?

Mind you, I remember a similar reaction when I first read GF so no doubt in a few months I'll be swearing by the great tips I picked up there...but if you ever catch me stressing about whether supper is in the crockpot by mid-morning, please slap me gently with a wet flannel!

Yes I am the flylady but I can't be, because I don't wear shoes in the house and I can't shine my sink, its made of plasticy stuff that doesnt go shiny.

elliott- I have just made a whole batch of meatballs and neatly frozen them for meals later in the week.

My piece de resistance was putting all the jigsaws into plastic bags, cutting off the pic to put inside for easier storage

I have a dp who is more anal than me, our poor children will grow up mess-loving rebels.

lol, bugsy, you are not alone, that's how i felt when i read flylady! we weren't doing exactly the same things (e.g. like enid my sink is made of non-shiny material) - conceptually we were already more or less there! now everyone will loathe me too.

Well in between reading Mumsnet and checking out the Fly Lady I've got even less done than possible. Of the 11 Commandments No.4 has definitely not been adhered to. Dp has just rang up to see if I've finished the ironing lol I've not even started it yet. I told him I was being constructive by organising my time and trying to find websites that help with budgeting the finances. All in all I've done bugger all.

That's it, I'm off to slob on the sofa with a bag of Sainsbury's Cheesey Balls. If I can find the sofa under the abandoned toys and clothing (children's clothing I hasten to add.)

ooh, soupdragon, just think of the crumbs!

I never make just one meal. If you are cooking it is just as easy to do as Enid did and make huge batches to freeze and use later. And with things like meatballs you can get the kids involved as well - I know I used to love "helping" my Mum to cook.

I am deliberately not going to the flylady site because I am scared I might be her too
Bossykate - are you sure we weren't seperated at birth

I always do the make one to eat and one for the freezer system. But not meatballs - still haven't go the hang of getting them to stick together.