How I love, LOVE the Flylady.
She is the initiator of a website (flylady.com) that includes daily emails from her "followers" for lack of a better word, to encourage the lot of us to keep our households from becoming chaos.
A friend of mine, Katie, mentioned to me that once she became a stay at home mom, the Flylady helped her become organized in her household.
I decided to try it out and am a firm believer.
My 650sf apartment now has a baby bed, rocking mechanism, bouncer, vibrating chair, activity mat, and rock and play and because of my organizing and creativity in geometric placement I do not feel like I am going to go insane. All because of the flylady.
Basically, she teaches you how to keep things neat and orderly and clean(ish) ish being a very important part of the system. So that you look around your house (or small apartment in my case) and feel happy and restful and not like there are a million things to do and you don't have the energy to do any of them.
Some of the great things she's taught me,
"You can do anything for 15 minutes" If you are dreading a job or just getting overwhelmed as you look around, set the timer for 15 minutes and get to it. You can stop at 15 minutes, or what I have learned is that you are usually done in 15 minutes!
"Take a lick at a snake" which means wipe it up quickly and don't worry about it. It looks better than if you hadn't.
"A job imperfectly done still blesses the family" which means that when you keep something pretty neat on a daily basis it is much better than ignoring it until you can clean it perfectly. Plus you're not ignoring it when it is a mess, it is really bugging you!
"Do it for yourself and don't be a martyr" love your family by cleaning up the house, it is mostly for you anyway because you are happier when it looks neat and don't give out chores that you will be really frustrated about the family member not getting done just do those ones yourself. Stop whining.
It has revolutionized my feeling about the apartment and whether we can stick it out here for another year. Which would be the best financial thing for us right now. Houses near us that we'd like to buy are about 1.2 million dollars with about 15k in property taxes. So our little 1300 dollar apartment is quite ideal for our savings.
I also watch you tube videos about people in tiny (98sf) apartments in Manhattan to be more inspired about our so spacious apartment. :)
ReplyDeleteI want to let you know about our new Flying Facebook group. It would be a great place to share your blog.
https://www.facebook.com/groups/430148793728031/
It is a closed group so your activity within the group is not visible to your other friends.
Share what you're doing. This is a great place to post what you're accomplishing during the day. You may even find a bit of encouragement as you go along. It's like a to do list with a cheering section!
We also have another group called Chit Chat About This and That. You are all welcome to join there as well. https://www.facebook.com/groups/333382423430509/
Hi there!
ReplyDeleteI see you are a FlyBaby, too !! Me too, Flying from Quebec, Canada.. :)
You
don't know me, and I feel a bit funny asking you a favor...But I
thought maybe it could interest you as well...So here I am. I jump in!
I've
been working on building a brand new flybabies forum, for all of us. I
know there is the official one, but there is so often problems with the
blogtalk website, and a lot of people don't feel comfortable with it.
Plus, I find it is not very active...
I'm dreaming of a big FlyBabies forum, where everything is possible and Flybabies from all over the world can come and talk.
Do
you think you can help me, by any means? Whatever you do is fine..You
can come, visit and suscribe, maybe post the link on your blog if you
like it? Share it with some other followers of the FlyLady's method?
(Please,
just don't forget, I'm creating this on my own as of now, it is still brand new, so there is no other members as of
now...But I want to try make it work....really.)
http://www.flybabiesforum.boards.net