Setting a Goal to Not Get Finished

As you can imagine, it's totally insane having ten kids. Even though two of them have moved out, there are still eight, including a 3-year-old, 2 year-old twins and a 2-month-old.

To try to get anything accomplished during the day with the 4 under 4 is like moving Mt. Everest, literally. It is literally impossible to get done in a day all that I think I need to get done. If I focus on making my kitchen spotless...,

...then the laundry get neglected. If I focus on laundry, then the kitchen doesn't get done...

If I focus on making a spectacular breakfast...

...then no cleaning at all gets done, and the kitchen gets messier than it was before.

So this is what I've come up with. I've decided that if there is an area of my house that is driving me crazy, for instance, the island in the kitchen, which was cluttered with so much junk it made the whole kitchen look ridiculous, I am going to set the time for 5 minutes and work on decluttering that area.

Now I know this system has been tried before by people like The Fly Lady, but she uses 15-minute increments. Even that time-frame is not doable for me, because it seems like there is never a 15-minute span of time where at least one out of the four isn't either crying, making a mess, or creating some type of emergency situation, like the molasses disaster..

...that needs my attention.

So you might wonder what one can accomplish in 5 minutes. Let me tell you.... more than you think. Here's what happens. You work for 5 minutes, and you can see that you're making a dent. And it feels good to be getting something done. Your mind has a focal point and you aren't wandering around the house wondering what mountain to move next.

As minute 6 approaches, you realize that the baby is still happily kicking on his quilt, the twins are still playing upstairs in the toy room and the 3-year-old is still looking for some outlandish outfit to wear.

So you keep organizing. And the more you do, the better it feels, and it becomes a cycle of cleaning and organizing and ego-feeding, not a vicious cycle, but an I-might-actually-be-a-good-homemaker cycle!

This worked so well the other day when the twins got into the flour bin in the food storage room while I was blogging, breastfeeding, breastfeeding and blogging....and the rice bin...and the popcorn bin..... and then....

...they poured cups of water from the water fountains on top of all this and walked around in it a lot and then walked all over the kitchen.

I knew in my mind that there would be no way I could clean all of this up at once, so I simply closed the door to the food storage room, cleaned the flour/popcorn/rice trackings in the kitchen, and waited until I had 5 minutes to make a dent in the food storage room. And it worked! I didn't get it cleaned up all at once (it actually took 3 days of 5-minute increments), but by the time John came home from out of town, all he saw was organized shelves of our year's supply of food and 4 happy little boys.

I challenge you to try this and let me know how it goes!

Thanks for listening.

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