Cleaning up my act

"I want surfaces, darling, SURFACES!"

For months now (I'd say exactly 5 and 1/2 of them) I've been complaining that I can't get the hang of this 2 kids at once thing. Mostly I miss being able to head off to the gym on a regular basis. I had a trainer for awhile and he used to let me hit and kick stuff. In addition to being a good workout, it provided a delightful release. I found that hitting the big punching bag until I was exhausted made me feel a euphoric sense of love for mankind. (Pot can have that effect, too, but it won't give you defined triceps.) Now I can't get it together enough to have personal time with the punching bag at the gym. In addition, the house always seems in unpleasant disarray and so do I. And the dog stinks. Sometimes the kids do, too. Now I've said too much.

Anyway, instead of telling me to stop that infernal whining when I brought this up to her, Heather very politely turned me on to The FLYlady. I've never been one for that kind of thing, but I figured since I wasn't mastering life on my own I could use the help. First, let me just say, this woman is unbearable. I think I could remain in her company for maybe 15 minutes before developing a twitch. Twenty minutes if I had a good buzz on. I think she's the real-life Jean Teasdale. Despite her rainbows and unicorns cheerfulness, I am reading her book Sink Reflections and have been implementing many of her recommendations with happy results. The best thing about her book, though, is that as I read it I realize I'm way more together than the audience she's addressing! These people are apparently living in complete squalor and are miserable about it and in need of medication. I'm worried about cobwebs up in the office that I never seem to get around to removing and she's saying "move the gigantic pile of dishes in your sink out of the sink and drain the disgusting water that's in there..." I don't have a big pile of dishes or any disgusting water in my sink, so I get to skip ahead a couple paragraphs, and that's reward enough for me.

Still, I like the way she's laid out the plan for managing to keep the house in working order in between going to work and caring for kids. I am giving it a whirl. Jeremiah's been a big help, too. The main goal here is to have the house, myself, the pets, and Kate & Sarah put together in a systematic enough manner that soon...very soon, I can escape to yoga class. Namaste FLYlady and Jean Teasdale!