Dear FlyLady,

I have been checking your website for years and trying to adapt your
system to my life. I am a stay at home mother of six–age 14 to 3.
This year, I finally decided to sign up for the e-mails and start
wearing my shoes! I always resisted that one, but now I no longer
have rough feet!! Thank you.

The reason I am writing is because I ordered some tools from you for
the first time. The two items I felt would be useful were the small
feather duster and a rubba scrubba.

I received my package in Monday’s mail and was excited to try out my
new tools. I had already done my Weekly Home Blessing. For dusters,
I had used an attachment to my Eureka Capture + vacuum and a Swiffter.
The vacuum attachment works great for cobwebs and to dust the ceiling
fan but didn’t work well for shelves and dusting around decorative
items. The Swifters always seem to catch and leave behind fuzz.

The feather duster is wonderful. I owned one before, but it was not
nearly as fluffy as yours. I was able to dust around everything, even
a glass plate that I keep on my dresser and set my everyday jewelry
on–It didn’t disturb a single piece!

Then I opened my rubba scrubba. I purchased two–one for dirty jobs
and another for maybe food. I read how the one woman used hers to
clean her carrots. We grow a big garden in the summer. I had a
specific job in mind for this tool. I was glad we were in the kitchen
zone. I bought it to clean the gasket area around my built in
dishwasher. There was a lot of build up and I was worried about
scrubbing it with something too sharp or rough and ruining the rubber
gasket. Well, the rubber on rubber was really safe and did a great
job! When I was finished, I used it to scrub out my kitchen trash
cans– The mission for the day! Thank you so much!

My eight year old son, added the Flylady sticker that came with my
order to his collection of stickers on his take home folder from
school. I wonder if he will get any comments on it?! The kids tease
me about the FlyLady, but it is working. My younger kids loved
watching your “Cruising through the Holidays” videos with me. We
would love more videos like that.

My biggest challenge is paper clutter. With six kids (five are in
school), a lot of papers come into the house everyday. Plus, there are
my husbands papers. I have a hard time figuring out whether something
needs to be saved or not. I also like to save ideas, recipes, etc.
I’m good about cutting them out of magazines and such, but I haven’t
come up with the best idea to organize them–file folders? a binder?

Thank you for your website. My mom passed away 12 years ago, she was
a wonderful housekeeper. You have been my source for advice on
keeping my house in order. I now have two rooms in my house that are
always clean–the dining room and our bedroom. I know my house will
never be perfect and that is ok. As my mom used to say, “We live in
our house.”

Sincerely,

Suzanne
South Bend, Indiana

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FlyLady here: Papers are a mounting problem for all FlyBabies. We
mound them up and the piles fall over.

I have an idea for the stuff you cut out of the magazines. Get a three
ring binder and fill it full of sheet protectors. You can have a
binder for recipes and one for other things. I did one of these once
for my garden ideas. It was my wish book. Don’t get all carried away
with putting everything in the sheet protectors perfectly. Just slide
it in and go on to the next thing.

Here is the key to making this work. When you see an article you like
and want to keep; tear it out right then and slide it in the sheet
protector. “Do it now” saves hours looking for the article in your
magazine stash.

Children’s papers are a piece of cake!

Get a bundle of 9 X 12 envelopes for mailing papers. Collect the
papers each week from each child in a folder. On Saturday have each
child pick out their favorite work for the week. Put that on the
refrigerator/bulletin board or on the wall in the laundry room. This
can be your wall of fame! Then teach the children to address the
envelope to their grandparents or aunts and uncles. Poof! The papers
are gone! Your family loves to see what the children are doing and the
kids learn how to let go of stuff. You also have only 52 papers for
each child instead of several thousand for their scrapbooks. You can
start those with sheet protectors too.