My Afternoon Routine

One of my favorite tools from the Flylady is the concept of routines. A routine is something you do every day, and putting it in a specific order helps you to remember and learn it until you don't have to think about it. And having a little checklist, either on a post it or in your Control Journal can help.


In my recent post about keeping up with the laundry, I shared my morning routine. It looks like this:

1. Make my bed
2. Get dressed to shoes
3. Feed baby
4. Wake other kids
5. Start a load of laundry
   
6. Prep & drink smoothies (hubby usually does this)
   
7. Prep school lunches (hubby usually does this)
   
8. Cleanup kitchen/empty dishwasher
   
9. Baby to nap
10. HANG CLOTHES OUT TO DRY/laundry "reboot"

My late morning routine looks like this:

1. Cleanup kitchen if it's not already done
2. blog post/computer work/desk work 1/2 hr
3. declutter 15 minutes
4. daily mission/detail cleaning/weekly home blessing as needed
5. outside time or other activity with children
   
6. prep lunch

And my afternoon routine (babystep #23), looks like this:

1. Serve lunch/feed baby/eat lunch myself
   
2. Lunch cleanup
3. prep snacks for school children
4. put toddler to nap
5. welcome school kids home/give snacks
6. story time with 4 year old (and anyone else who wants to join us)
   
7. put baby & 4 year old to nap/bigger boys to quiet reading
8. MY QUIET TIME! computer/reading/nap if I want.

It really is helpful to do it the same way every day; it helps me to not forget anything. Since I've been doing it for a while, it does come automatically so I don't consult my control journal, but if I were new to this or found myself leaving things out, I certainly would.

Flylady gives her routines as examples. Use any of these to give you ideas; just remember that you need to make it work for YOU.

Laundry. Day 20 of Babystep Challenge To A Peaceful Home

We now have seven people in our home. SEVEN! Seven people wear a lot of clothes. Especially when one of them is a baby who sucks her hand between spoon-fed bites and then holds her toes and the food goes everywhere in between....and four of them are of the little-boy variety who play hard, in dirty things, every day.

So, we have a lot of laundry. I remember when I was in college & in my single days when I could go a week (or more!) without doing my laundry. Those days are long since done, and the habit I've learned would have been helpful even then.

What is that habit, you may ask? How do you stay on top of the laundry when THERE'S JUST SO MUCH OF IT!? You make laundry part of your routine. Which just so happens to be Flylady's babystep #20.

This means that I do laundry EVERY DAY. Well, 6 days a week. It's just part of my morning routine which looks like this:

1. Make my bed
2. Get dressed to shoes
3. Feed baby
4. Wake other kids
5. START A LOAD OF LAUNDRY
6. Prep & drink smoothies
7. Prep school lunches
8. Cleanup kitchen/empty dishwasher
   
9. Baby to nap
10. HANG CLOTHES OUT TO DRY/laundry "reboot"

I do this every day, with slight variations. If I do one FULL load each day, it's almost enough. Add an extra load or two for towels & sheets and we're good to go. In addition to this, we do a load of cloth diapers each night. In the morning they are dried and ready to put away (this job belongs to my four year old).

My biggest challenge with the laundry is not the washing and the drying. Even the folding I've gotten a new system for: since I'm line drying, I realized that I must handle each piece of clothing separately as I take it off of the line. So, I add a few seconds for each one and FOLD IT AS I TAKE IT OFF THE LINE AND PUT IT INTO THE BASKET ALREADY FOLDED! I was excited when I realized I could save time like that.



No, the challenge is putting the clothes away. I do have a time in my schedule that is supposed to be for this, but I've gotten behind most days and needed to skip this step. And, the drawers are so full that there's no place to put things. So everyone lives out of the laundry basket. It's no good.





Today, I'm going to actually use the time that's supposed to be set aside for putting away the laundry to fold and put away the laundry. That will mean that we must eat our lunch on time and stick to the schedule I worked hard to put together. Then I'll be able to see this.

Which feels good.