BabyStepping Makes a Difference

Dear FlyLady Greetings and Thanks,

I am still very slowly working my way through the babysteps, but what a difference they have already made, right down to my attitude! I find myself thinking, “Babysteps, babysteps” or “Progress, not perfection” instead of my old stinkin’ thinkin’.

The sink babystep helped my menu planning, because it broke the cycle of needing to do dishes right before starting to cook, instead of right after. I now cook a larger fraction of what I plan (progress not perfection!). Feeding my family healthy homemade meals is very important to me.

I got inspired by last month’s habit to make swish and swipe part of each day. I sometimes still miss a day but it is pretty regular now. It makes our bathrooms look and smell like we are staying in a hotel. I have started babystepping Dear Son toward taking over his bathroom. He’s good at the swish part, still working on the swipe part.

Since I’ve been spending a long time on the first month, making a “pause” on one of the days for as long as needed (I’m up to day 17! – working on that “bed at reasonable hour” item), I realized that I need to start standing up the weekly home blessing. I work full time so I’ve been trying to gradually do more of the blessing each week, doing at most one or two items per day, with the goal of eventually doing a complete blessing. The idea of babysteps really helped me not feel overwhelmed, as did the timer – the idea that I could just mop 15 minutes worth of our huge downstairs flooring and not the whole thing in one giant effort.

I also am a big fan of your calendar, which I started using for the first time this month. I had been making fledgling efforts to have some kind of real calendar again after a long hiatus, but I love your calendar. When I put it on the table to write in its giant squares it was incredibly reassuring, giving a sense of getting something really organized and in place. I hung the calendar right outside the kitchen (our fridge is nonmagnetic) in a spot where everyone can see it first thing in the morning. Already DS has started adding his own items using his color-coded pen. He told me last night, “I need to mark down my music lesson!” and wrote it down for the whole month. The children do watch…

I am fortunate that my worst room is a closet and not a room, but when I started the 5 minute room rescue I had reached the point of dreading opening the door. It is an under-stair closet so the shelves get skinnier as they get higher. The 5 minutes helped so much – I really could do “anything” for 5 minutes. I started on the bottom so that I could use the floor as a staging area for the rest of the closet. Little by little it has really transformed. Eventually I combined the 15 minute declutter with the room rescue and I’m already up to the third shelf.

I bought a labeler and brand new file folders so that everything will be super easy to find in future. I’ve also found that this project requires me to cut myself a lot of slack on the rest of my flight. Some of the bins can be difficult to go through – in one I found the bulletin from my dad’s funeral nearly 40 years ago – and on those days I don’t always get the sink shined. I’ve also set about finally deodorizing all the batches of papers my mom has sent me over the years, which have the musty smell of her house (I bag them with baking soda; sometimes it takes quite a while for the smell to vanish).

Meanwhile DS has been watching. I gave him the student control journal which he sort of uses. His hotspot is the pile of things on the bottom of the stairs that belong upstairs in his room, and he has been keeping it clear! He’s been getting ready to go back to school, and one evening before bed he showed me a pile of items in the hallway outside his playroom. Without being asked, he has started decluttering his toys, books, and art supplies. He told me, “I’m at an age where I’ve outgrown these.” I was so proud!

Finally I have a tip for keeping items like feather dusters away from cats. I had tried storing dry cat food in a plastic bin but the cat managed to crack it open somehow, so I moved it from the floor onto the fridge. That worked for a while until the cat got up on the fridge one day and knocked it off, breaking it into pieces and scattering cat food all over. I thought to myself, what is a cat-proof storage solution? What location is inaccessible to a cat?

Then I realized – the inside of the cat carrier! Cats can’t get out and they also can’t get in. I now store the dry food and treats in the carrier, which has the added bonus that the cat no longer associates the carrier exclusively with a trip to the vet. Depending on the relative size of the feather duster and the carrier, this might work for a duster as well. (I keep my feather duster in the arctic entryway, which is closed off from the rest of the house. I love the duster!)

Thank you and God bless!

High Altitude FlyBaby

FlyLady here: I understand how hard it is to find unexpected sad memory in your paper clutter. It can throw your routines off. The best thing to do is to say a little prayer for your loved one and remember the good days not the sad ones. They would not want us to be sad!
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