Off track, but still going forward

I realize that having not updated in over a month, especially after my pity party last post, makes it seem that I have indeed given up. Rest assured that is not the case. Mostly, I have just been busy trying to tread water. The day to day tasks of laundry, meal prep, and kid activities have taken up most of my time. I have not made a whole lot of forward progress on Project Better Mom, but I haven’t back slid either. At this point, I am counting that as a win.

I recently realized that the order I had listed my projects needed to be updated. While the kitchen is important, now that the counters were cleared, the chaos hidden behind closed cabinets could wait. When we moved into this house, the plan was to have the laundry get washed and folded in the laundry room (novel idea, I know) so that it would only enter the house when it was ready to be put away. Due to the way we were not able to properly unpack when we first moved in, it didn’t happen. The folding table is stacked with boxes of craft items. In order to keep the never ending stream of laundry from taking over our living space, the laundry room area needed to be rescued.

I have found that it is important to be flexible on these things. As you go about your day to day life, you often discover that things you thought were really important might need to take a back seat to other things. It’s cool, adjust and move on.

The laundry room is a trickier task than the kitchen. It involves heavy boxes and high shelves. I could do it by myself, but it will be a lot easier if I have Mike’s help. Guess what we have scheduled for Thanksgiving vacation?

In the mean time, I am again focused on just keeping my head above water at home. This mostly involves trying to stay on top of the laundry.

Last week I had an unexpectedly productive day. We buy lunch snacks like crackers and cookies in big boxes and then I package them into serving sizes myself. While serving the little girls their lunches, I noticed the new boxes of crackers and cookies that needed to be packaged up. I grabbed the sandwich baggies and the cereal containers in which I store the snacks and sat down at the table to get to work. Once I finished packaging, I went to put the containers back into the pantry. Lo’ and behold, there was no room for neither the containers filled with pre-portioned baggies nor the extras needing to be packaged.

I cleared off the offending shelf and reorganized its contents. I discovered several empty Tupperware containers in the back. Now I could actually properly store the 3 kinds of flour Mike brought home last week. After a bit of shifting and transferring I had successfully created a baking section in the pantry. Placing the snacks on the shelf along with peanut butter and tuna created a lunch section. Now I had one neat tidy shelf in an otherwise messy pantry. I just kept going. When I got to the top shelf, I decided that it was time to install shelf paper. The shelves were previously lined with that cushy stuff that prevents sliding. I needed to be able to slide stuff back on the shelf. Fortunately, I had several rolls of adhesive shelf paper in the garage. Before I knew it, the pantry had been reorganized.

I moved on to the cabinet above the pantry. We mostly use this cabinet to store bulk items that don’t get used frequently. I discovered some bulk spice containers that often get forgotten because they were stored at the back of this high shelf. This led to re-purposing the cabinet closest to the stove as a spice cabinet. Now all of my spices, along with cooking oils, and sauces like Worcestershire and soy are conveniently stored right next to the stove. I was able to move the turntable that sat on the counter up into this cabinet as well, giving me another counter surface as well.

So, in the month plus since my last update, I bumped pantry and cabinets down on my master list in favor of laundry room. I then completed reorganizing the pantry anyway. In the end a project got finished and crossed off the list, so WOO HOO!

I quit?

And now I have reached the part of my quest where I give up.

I had just spent the better part of two days working on cleaning and organizing. I am very aware of the fact that there is a LOT more ahead of me. The clean shiny surface of my newly organized counter tops was helping me stay motivated to finish the task. After dinner, I left the house to visit a friend. When I left, there was an hour and a half until bedtime, and the girls had just finished their bath.

I came home late and headed straight down the hall. I peeked into my room to find my husband, Mike, hunched over asleep at the computer. I continued to the laundry room to start a load of the kids’ uniforms for school the next day. When I returned to the bedroom, the hubs was awake, and in the process of getting ready for bed. We chatted a bit, and I asked him if he could transfer the load of laundry to the dryer when he got up in the morning. He said, “Of course” and we headed to bed.

In the morning, I woke up just before Mike headed out for work. On my way out to the front room I was greeted by my early birds, M and O. I shuffled into the kitchen to discover a sink full of dirty dishes, and a dishwasher full of more dirty dishes. It was picture day at M’s school, so I sighed in frustration and got busy getting her started on her day. Once the little girls were having breakfast, I went to wake up my older daughter. I noticed that I could not hear the dryer running. Sure enough, Mike had forgotten to put the kids’ uniforms into the dryer. With only 50 minutes until their ride to school arrived, I was not confident that the clothes would dry in time. I made sure to clear the lint trap and got the dryer started.

I made another attempt to wake up the older kids, and checked on the younger ones at the breakfast table. After washing hands and faces, I started getting M dressed. The older kids were still lying in bed, but a final, much louder wake up call got them up and moving. I assigned my oldest with the task of serving up breakfast for herself and her brother, while I started the daily drama of brushing M’s hair. After much crying and protest, M was ready for school and looking appropriately adorable for her picture. At this point, with 30 minutes until the carpool arrived, I remembered that I had not made the kids’ lunches the night before. I rushed into the kitchen to quickly throw together some sandwiches. I finished the lunches in a mere 5 minutes.

Urging the kids to finish breakfast, I went to the laundry room to check on the progress of the load in the dryer. Finally! Something was working in my favor. The laundry was dry, or at least it was close enough. I grabbed an outfit for each kid and went back out to the front. After repeated reminders and urges to hurry, the kids managed to brush their teeth, get dressed and brush their hair. The carpool for the older kids and the bus for M arrived just as I handed out the lunches. After another burst of activity getting everybody in their respective rides, I carried O back inside and collapsed on the couch.

I haven’t even had my coffee yet.

I was frustrated. I was angry. I was feeling, once again, that nothing I did mattered. Why should I bother? It just gets undone anyway. I was knee deep into a pity party of epic proportions. I had a cup of coffee, or three, and started to feel a bit better. Not do the damn dishes better, but make a loaf of challah and a pan of lasagna better. By the afternoon, a sudden unexplainable wave of exhaustion hit me, so when Mike got home I went to lie down.

When I woke up from my nap, Mike had done all of the dishes and set the table for dinner. Have I mentioned that my husband is awesome? I realized that this process is going to take time for all of us. I can’t do this all by myself, but I can’t expect my family to suddenly have good habits just because I want them to. If I give up now how will they learn? (Oy, that sounds so cheesetastic!) I can’t give up just because one day went badly.

Onward.

Easier Said Than Done

I am not a naturally organized or neat person. Like, really not. I have friends who are inherently tidy. I have family that border on compulsive about it. For me, though, it is a constant uphill battle. I am great at the planning stage of cleaning and organizing. I excel at the prioritizing, the list making and the diagram drawing. It is the doing and follow through that always get me. In one of my previous attempts at not being a slob, I purchased some books on organizing. I came across one of them recently and of course I figured that reading about how to organize counts towards my effort to becoming organized.

As suggested in the book, I wrote down what I wanted to accomplish and why. I then made a list, in priority order, of the areas in my home that needed work.

My Master List:

1. Kitchen-it is the major center of activity in my house, and being able to cook meals quickly and easily is the key to our debt reduction plan. It is easier and more appealing to cook in a clean well organized kitchen.
2. Mail Center-a major source of clutter, and relatively quick to fix.
3. Master Bedroom-currently doubles as our office, so it is full of piles of paper and other clutter. Not exactly conducive to restful sleep.
4. Garage-not only contains storage, but is also our laundry room and will hopefully have a craft/sewing area for me and a place to set up our underused treadmill. Having this area organized will aid us in keeping the rest of the house neat.
5. The Kids’ Rooms-All three are a mess. They have inadequate storage for toys, leading to lost and broken parts.
6. Front Room-this room is low priority because it currently doesn’t have much in it and sorting out the rest of the house will get the bulk of this room sorted as well.
7. Patio-We hope to eventually create a welcoming outdoor seating area in which to enjoy barbecues and summer evenings.

Now that I have my first target, I need to figure out what I want to do in there. I tried to break my kitchen issues down into the logical areas that needed work, and again listed them in priority order. Under each area I also wrote down the key elements I wanted to fix or centers I wanted to create as well.

My Abbreviated Kitchen List:

1. Counter tops
2. Cabinets
3. Pantry
4. Fridge
5. Freezer
6. Big Freezer (in the garage, but included here because it is essentially and extension of the kitchen)


Starting with the counter tops because it is the main work area, and has the biggest visual impact in the kitchen, I thought about what things actually justified taking up valuable counter real estate, things that get used almost daily. These are the things I came up with.

1. Coffee Center-coffee pot, coffee canister, filters, sweetener, etc.
2. Canisters-flour, sugar, etc.
3. Spices- I have a turntable with the most frequently used ones next to the stove.
4. Small Appliances- toaster oven, can opener
5. Homework Center-I made an area for all of the supplies the kids need to do their homework. Each child has a box with pencils, crayons, scissors, glue stick etc. And I also set up an area for paper and extra supplies, and a place for all of the papers and forms they bring home from school.

The reading of the organizing book and coming up with the plan above took a day. I don’t mean that it took a whole day to accomplish it, but that that was what I accomplished that day. The next day I decided to get started on the actual work part. I looked at how I needed to accomplish the Counter Top step.

1. Wash and put away dishes.
2. Do DDD. Armed with 3 containers, Dispose, Donate, and Distribute to other areas of the house, clear off the counter surfaces. This saves time by not walking down the hall every time I find an item that belongs in another room. For the kitchen, the donate bin actually held recyclables.
3. Wipe down all surfaces.
4. Set up my centers from above list.

And that’s as far as I got. I spent the remainder of the day trying to keep my youngest daughter from removing all of her clothes, (diaper included) every 10 minutes.


Each new day is a new opportunity to do better (barf) so I set to work. Fortunately, it was warm enough out that I didn’t need to concern myself too much with Olivia’s state of dress. I figured it would take between 2 and 21/2 hours to do what I wanted with the counter tops.

As I worked I jotted down things I had overlooked in my planning. Things like the need for a Phone Center. Basically, just a notepad and pen holder placed near the phone, a simple, but necessary thing. Cleaning the stove top took much longer than I had intended, and to be honest, it still isn’t as clean as I would like. There is a lot of really baked on crud around the burners that I haven’t figured out how to remove. After an hour of soaking and scrubbing and soaking again, I had to move on. When I got to the Spices, I decided that I actually wanted them in the cupboard instead of on the counter top. I gave the turntable a wipe down and noted the change on my list. In the end, it took me 4 hours to do the job. Actually, it took me 4 hours until I was too pooped to do any more. The job itself was almost finished. Once I sat down, I wrote a new list. This one was of all the things I still needed to do before this job was truly finished.

1. Homework Center-Find a storage solution for the forms and flyers that need to be kept temporarily. (Magnetic file pocket on the side of the fridge?)
2. Phone Center-add a note pad
3. Distribute Bin- finish emptying it.

My feet hurt.

Identifying the problem

My journey to becoming Better Mom began back in April, when I was trying to pay bills. I had forgotten, yet again, about some check or transaction, and our account had overdrawn. Of course, 5 transactions cleared after the overdraft, so we had about $140 in overdraft fees. This was the third month in a row that this had happened, and losing $100 to $200 in fees was not an uncommon occurrence over the past year. Here we were, struggling to raise 4 kids on a single income, and my forgetfulness was costing us hundreds, if not thousands, of dollars.

So, we need more money. That’s simple enough, I’ll get a job. It has to be in the evening after my husband gets home because the cost of childcare would negate any income. It can’t go past 11pm because I still have to get up in the morning to get the older kids up and off to school, and then take care of the little ones all day. I can’t work on Monday because that is scout night. I can’t work on Wednesday because my husband has to go run the Hebrew school. I am willing to work weekends, but I teach a class Sunday morning so I can’t work before 2pm on Sundays. Let’s not forget that the economy is bad and I have been out of the work force for 9 years.

OK, not so simple. Maybe getting a job isn’t the way to go. What other options are there? I could work from home. I could, if I could find a work from home job that I am qualified to do that isn’t a scam and allows for a lot of schedule flexibility. A few too many hours spent with my good friend Google tells me this isn’t the way to go either. CRAP. What’s left? If I can’t earn more money we are just going to have to spend less. Desperate for help, I turn once again to the Google. I search “frugal living.” Several of the hits I get are ads selling a book or telling me that a mom “just like me” made 8 gazillionty dollars in 5 seconds with this secret, ORDER NOW!! But, amongst the garbage, were some helpful sites. On one, I read about a family who paid off a large amount of debt in a relatively short time on a small income. I immediately signed up for their newsletter, and I was on my way toward a frugal lifestyle.

Initially, a lot of the tips I read seemed like common knowledge. I mean cooking at home is cheaper than dining out, DUH. I was thinking, “We hardly ever dine out, I need to cut my grocery bill.” I was looking for ways to save on groceries because that is the biggest part of our budget after rent. We spent between $600 and $700 a month on things from the grocery store, including paper goods and cleaning supplies. Fortunately, I use Quicken to track our spending and keep a budget. Even though I am not as diligent about assigning spending categories as I could be, a quick search showed that we were actually spending an average of $300 a month on dining. Our occasional pizza or taco night combined with a few “run through the drive through because we are in a hurry” really does add up. I had no idea we were wasting so much money on these “cheap pick up meals.”

Step 1: Plan ahead to avoid the need for last minute take-out.

The thing about planning meals (or anything else, for that matter) ahead is that it requires organization. I am not organized. I am a mess. I am procrastination. I am don’t wanna. We were able to immediately make a big dent in our dining out habit (enough to put a stop to the overdraft cycle), but the mess in the kitchen and my tendency to procrastinate was making it difficult to progress further. My ultimate goal is to pay off our debt so that we can finally buy a house. Paying off the debt would require further budget cuts.

I started making our own laundry detergent. It is actually much easier than you might think. It takes less than half an hour, and the batch lasts us well over a month. I also started making our own dishwasher detergent, but unlike the laundry stuff which seemed to work about as well as the store bought, it wasn’t very effective and left a film on all the dishes. Baking Mix and several seasoning mixes are now all made at home in an effort to cut costs. While all of this is great, and has indeed helped, it is really just an effort to avoid what I know I need to do.

Step 2: Get organized.

It Begins

I hate the idea of a “Super Mom.” That we, as women, must have a successful career, an organized and beautiful home, serve nutritious home cooked meals and volunteer our time with the PTA, scouts, etc. all while being gorgeous and endlessly patient blah, blah, blah. It is yet another ridiculous standard unto which we hold ourselves. Sure, a few women might be able to manage this, but there are a few women who actually look like supermodels too. For the rest of us, it is just another thing we can’t quite accomplish, and another way to feel not quite good enough.

On the surface I pretend to be Super Mom. I teach a pre-school class at our synagogue once a week, I lead a Girl Scout troop with 20 members. I watch my friend’s son after pre-school twice a week. I cook 95% of our family dinners etc, etc. It sounds like I do a lot and I tend to play that up when I catch up with family and friends. In reality, I am not Super Mom; I am not even a Middle of the Road Mom. I am a Slacker Mom. My house is a mess. We have a huge pile of debt that doesn’t even include a mortgage. Everything is unorganized. We moved a little over a year ago, and we still have boxes waiting to be unpacked. I spend an embarrassing amount of time not doing anything of value. A large chunk of my day is spent on the sofa, on my laptop, playing games or posting on message boards. I often feel like I am useless. I am doing everything at the last minute and am always stressed out. I yell at my kids way more than I should. It is time to fix it. I don’t want to be Super Mom; I just want to be Better Mom.