simplify my household routines

I’ve enlisted DH to help out with the housework and he’s actually been doing his part! Mostly…

Last week I made and printed out checklists of our daily chores, and also my self-care goals. This has already started helping me get them done. I used to have them listed in Remember the Milk, which helped somewhat, but I don’t get online as much as I used to so hard copy is definitely the way to go now. I put them in my Household Notebook, which is slowly evolving into something useful.

At first it was hard to juggle doing housework and taking care of Baby, but we’ve finally figured out how to do both. Now, we just have to figure out how to fit in fixing up the house…

to help with the cooking and cleaning while we get used to having a newborn around. I am slowly getting back into the swing of things, and the house isn’t looking too messy. I actually did a load of laundry on my own yesterday.

We’ll see what happens when Mom leaves in a week or so.

I’m pretty proud of the meal plan I just made for this week. It’ll use up most of the perishable food items sitting around the kitchen (and a lot of non-perisahable ones, too) so we don’t have to move them to the new house next weekend. Plus, I think we can scrape through the week without even a trip to the grocery store. Yay!

I’ve been really bad about the household routines for the past week or so. I’ve been anxious about baby stuff and house stuff so it’s been really hard to focus on anything. Maybe this would be a good time to write up my Magic Minimum household chores so that at least I get something done around here…

Or, as FlyLady calls it, the “Control Journal.”

I started one over two years ago when I first found FlyLady – before I dumped her :-) I never really got it into very good shape. I didn’t have a clear vision of what it should be like, so I ended up including a lot of odds and ends that kept it from being organized or useful.

Over the past few weeks, I have been working on it a lot. It’s still got a long way to go, but I’ve actually been referring to it (a good sign!) I’ll probably make another post about it in a few weeks when it’s more complete.

Also, I have been including increasingly more of my household chores in my Remember the Milk to-do list. (As I mentioned a few weeks ago, I keep it displayed alongside my Gmail account.) This has made me much more productive around the house. I guess it helps, too, that I have more time at home recently.

She left this morning. I enjoyed having her here but the cleaning went to hell in the meantime. I already tidied up a few things this morning but there’s still a bunch left to do. It helps that we don’t actually own that much stuff so the place is still relatively tidy compared to many other houses/apartments. I am going to try to really stick to the scheduled routines this week in order to recover.

Our energy for recording entries in our housework log has been flagging, so tonight we decided to sign up for Chore Wars. Despite DH’s outward macho “that’s kind of silly” attitude, he immediately got drawn into defining the “adventures” and coming up with monsters and treasure. I kind of thought he might like it, he’s a huge fan of games involving character advancement. Let’s see if this is somewhat motivational for him. I predict it won’t happen right away since he’ll probably try to keep up the macho facade of “I’m not going to be motivated by this silly game” but I think it’ll get him eventually :-)

And reminders are sent every morning. Not that this will help motivate me to do stuff, but at least I will remember what I’m supposed to be doing.

by housework lately, like it’s taking way too much time, not leaving me any time for the things I want to do. I also feel a little resentment at the (perceived) imbalance between the amount of housework I do vs. how much DH does. So, for the short term we’ve agreed to start keeping a log of how much time we each spend on housework we each do. Then we can make informed decisions about how to redistribute assignments. Maybe it’ll reveal that I don’t actually have a lot of housework to do, I just blow it out of proportion and waste my time avoiding the work.

But streamlining the household routines is a big priority for me right now.

Lately I’ve been streamlining my grocery shopping routine, and getting some great deals at the same time.

Now, I go to CVS (and possibly Von’s, if they have a good deal) on Sunday, Ralph’s on Monday, and Cordon’s on Tuesday. I plan to cut out Trader Joe’s except for once a month to get the special stuff that only they have. Overall, this comes out to about the same number of shopping trips as before, but since I plan ahead they are more effective.

I get all my toiletries for super cheap (and mostly free) through my CVS shopping. Money Saving Mom has a really good guide for doing this, plus she writes up deals she finds in her blog so I barely even have to look at the weekly circular. Sometimes the deals are better-than-free, in that there are coupon overages which can apply toward other items that aren’t on sale.

I have started a price book and I stockpile my staple groceries when I see them for a very low sale price – which I know is low because I can check it against the history of prices I’ve seen and recorded in my price book.

I have also started using coupons and getting grocery items for super-cheap or free. I just keep the coupon inserts from the Sunday paper. I don’t even look at them when I get them, I just mark the front with the date and throw them in a folder. Then, each week I check Coupon Mom’s “Grocery Deals by State” to see how the items on sale at my local grocery stores line up with the coupons that have been distributed in the Sunday papers. I also hear about a lot of great grocery deals through Money Saving Mom. Now that I’ve been doing this for a few weeks, I can even guess what kinds of coupons should be available and match up my own deals by searching Coupon Mom’s coupon database. Yesterday I got four boxes of General Mills cereal for free (well, technically I also had a 20 cent overage that applied to my other groceries as well.)

Sure, this takes a little more time than simply shopping once a week at one store, but it honestly doesn’t take that much more time and it’s made grocery shopping into more of a hobby than the chore it used to be. I get giddy whenever I can get something for better-than-free! I just have to balance these deals with my goals of decluttering and reducing my environmental footprint. For example, I know how I could get tons of sample size baby shampoo for free – but can I really use it? Even if I can, do I want to throw all these tiny plastic bottles in the landfill? Another example is that this month I could actually make $3 by getting lots of Vitamin C supplements at CVS, but I run into the same questions. I definitely won’t use it on my own, but is there someone else I can pass it on to that would use it? I don’t know offhand. Things to think about.