Dear FlyLady,

Howdy All from Central Texas! I was just reading the testimonial where one FlyBaby was inspired by another FlyBaby, and it got me to thinking “What all have I learned from my fellow flybabies?” And “What crazy ideas have I come up with that might help someone else?” So I thought I’d write in, maybe you’d send it on, maybe you wouldn’t but I needed to send you a much overdue thank you anyway, so why not? Anyway here it is.

One of my fellow flyers sent in a testimonial about having tomorrow drawers for their kids. What a fabulous idea! I implemented it immediately with my then 2 children I think, now that we have 7 kids it is an invaluable tool in our morning routines. Everyone, even the 20 month old knows where their clothes are for the day and can get dressed with out my help.

Another early adopted idea was from the flybaby who uses different colored pencils or markers for each member of the family on the calendar so that she never has to write names, you know who the event applies to because of the color it’s written in. I found some markers, bought some magnet strips (I had a metal kitchen door at the time) and assigned each family member a color. My husband thought I was crazy, “Why don’t you just write everyone’s name?” But I stuck to it, and guess who picks up the black marker to add his things to the calendar? That’s right my husband. When I started we had 4 colors assigned, I had to go buy a big box of sharpies to stick with it as the family grew and now we use 9 colors! It’s one of the 1st things babies get in this house when they come home from the hospital, a color, and big siblings love to choose for them! Also my school age children love the calendar they look at it all the time and I’m going to work on calendar skills with my 7 &8 year olds so they don’t have to learn it all as an adult like their mommy did.

I’m sure there are much more, but this is getting lengthy so let’s move on.Thank you to FlyLady herself for being there and patient with me. Because of you Miss Marla my children have never known true chaos and hopefully never will. Now not everything is decluttered, and messes generally happen as a matter of course in this family, but there are not piles and piles of junk with paths through it. We can have friends over anytime and before we moved we hosted what I lovingly called Pool Friday every Friday of the summer for my kids and their friends. Miss Marla I was able to do that 2 years in a row! My husband could invite people over last minute and in general there wasn’t anything to stres over. We recently moved into a house twice as big as our last one, and because of all your teachings a weekly home blessing gets done most days of the week (we do 2 rooms everyday so we don’t get overwhelmed) and the bathrooms are always clean. My husband and I hardly argue over the state of the house anymore. It’s wonderful!

My epiphany to share has to do with Mt Washmore. We do 2 loads a day in this house with weekends off. The washing and drying is never a problem, the hold up is always the folding. Now I used to leave all the laundry folded or not wherever I happened to be folding until every stitch of clothing was folded and ready to put away. This resulted in people running out of clothes more than once, until yesterday when I was dividing up my time and the thought occurred to me instead of folding the whole 15 minutes, I can fold for 10 and put away for 5. Brilliant! That way at least somethings get moved out of my room and the kids have clothes to wear. I still have a bunch to fold but no one will be out of
anything.

Thanks again FlyLady! And keep sending the testimonials, we can all benefit from group ideas!

Cat in Pflugerville