A Little More about Routines

I told you Saturday about my Morning Routines (you can read about those here if you missed it) Most of those routines came from Flylady.net but I have adjusted them to what works best for me. Today I wanted to tell you some more about my routines to help keep our house in order and everything (well, almost everything) running smoothly.

The second set of routines I wanted to tell you about are my “Before Bed Routines.” I start working on these as soon as I get home from work or, on days I don’t work, about 4ish in the afternoon and they go on right until I go to bed.

Here is the page from my Control Notebook – I’ll tell you more about how that works on another day – Notice that everything is written in pencil, that’s so that when I need to adjust my routines later on its a lot easier than re-writing a whole new page. Any ways here they are:

Before Bed Routine

• Reboot Laundry – this is simply moving things from the washer to the dryer or drying rack.
• Make/Eat Dinner & Drink water

These are my water bottles :) Yes, they are Simply Orange bottles (That’s Kenny’s favorite orange juice) the little one came from Chic-fil-a! Anyways, the new rule of thumb for drinking water is to drink half your weight in water ounces (if you weigh 100lbs you’d drink 50 oz of water per day) The larger bottle holds the exact amount of Fluid ounces I’m supposed to drink everyday – it stays in the fridge. The little bottle is what I refill all day – its easier to carry :)

• Shine your sink – you can read all about this in a previous post called Baby Steps, Cleaning my Heart and Home - Day 1

• Check Calendar
• Finish Laundry – remember I only wash/dry/fold one load per day

• Lay out clothes for tomorrow
• Wash Face – did you know, ladies, when you don’t wash the make-up off of your face before bed it can add up to 13 days age to your skin? Not to mention your make-up is now on your pillow – yuck! Just for the record I’m not very good at doing this, so I tell myself the 13 day thing to make myself get up and go wash my face before bed.
• Get to bed at a decent time – For me, a switch inside starts turning off the lights at 10pm. Kenny can’t stand it, he’s a night owl but when my pillow starts calling… its hard to resist!

Well that’s pretty much it for my Daily Routines. Nicole over at A Living Sacrifice said that her focus for next month was going to be establishing routines. I can’t wait to hear what she has to say. Now that I’ve started with my routines I think its the greatest and I want everyone to have them! Hope you’ll check out her blog, I know I will be.

Flylady Update – I made it!

Ok, so, at the end of February I had a post written (that somehow never got posted :S ) to let you know that March was going to be a crazy busy month for us so I probably would not be doing much (if any) blogging but I was going to keep up with my baby steps and try to make it all the way through to day 31. It was going to go something like this…

“Hey everyone, February is going to be a crazy busy month for us so I probable won’t be doing much blogging. I do plan to keep up with my baby steps…”

You get the idea :)

Now that you know what the original idea was :) This is my post to let you know that I {FINALLY} made it all the way through all 31 baby steps! YAY ME! I know it seemed like I would never make it at the rate I was going but one thing I have learned is that they are called baby steps for a reason – your supposed to take your time and make them stick.

After finishing all of the baby steps I’ve also realized that I don’t need to declutter as much as she had on her list. Kenny and I don’t have a lot of things as it is and we kind of like it that way. {SIMPLE} is our motto! So I wanted to show you what I did decide to keep on my “Daily TO-DO” lists :)

 

This is the first page of my control journal (which I’m still learning to use) but it includes my morning routine. Later on, hopefully next week I’ll go through my “Before Bed routine with you but my Mornings go kind of like this:

Morning Routine

• Make Bed – our, unwritten, house rules on this one is: The last one up makes the bed. I’m usually the last one up so I almost always make the bed but that’s ok :)

• Get dressed to lace-up shoes including fixing hair and putting makeup on – ok so I get dressed but I usually keep my slippers on if I’m going to be home most of the day :) 
• Swish-n-swipe. This is a quick wipe-down of the mirror, sink area and the toilet. –Yes, that is my toilet bowl brush and it works amazingly well :) I got it from the flylady store for Christmas :)

• Eat Breakfast, drink water and take vitimins.
• Empty the dishwasher – I’m constantly putting dishes in the dishwasher all day so they don’t sit on the counter. Then, during my Before Bed routine, I start the dishwasher if its full so the dishes are nice and clean the next morning.

• Check Calendar - Our schedules are constantly changing so I’ve started using a free, online calendar from Cozi.com. Since it is an online thing Kenny and I can both add things to it from a computer or from our phones so we stay on the same page – now if I could just get Kenny to actually use it :)
• What’s for Supper? – This is a hard one for me, because I’m not very good at thinking ahead, but, once again, I’m working on it :)
• Start Laundry – Yes, this is an everyday thing – a load of laundry a day keeps me from having to spend my day off doing nothing but laundry :) Everything gets sorted into these baskets and I just pick the fullest one to wash – usually its the colors, Have I mentioned Kenny likes red? :)

BTW Mom G. this was my first project with the Cricuit :)

That’s pretty much it for my Morning Routine – I can have everything on this list finished in just over an hour.

Does anyone else have a routine they follow in the morning? Does it help you save time?