The neverending journey

I need to learn to lower my expectations. I already know that I should lower my expectations, I just don't actually know how to do it. And it is slowly making me crazy.

I'd like my home to look like something out of Better Homes and Gardens. I mean, stylistically, of course, but that's out of my reach. What feels within my reach, though, is a house with a place for everything and everything in it's place. I've aced the 'place for everything' due to a generously sized house with lots of storage space. Everything HAS a place. The problem is that no one but me puts anything in those places.

Them

The kids are just kids. Why spend time cleaning up when time could be spent playing? Or reading? Or aggravating your mother? Or eating for the fiftieth time today? And for that matter, why not combine some of these things? Eating and playing! Reading and aggravating your mother! So they make messes round the clock. And then when I tell them to clean up, they spend their time playing or reading instead. My older son even gives up on everything and just takes a nap. You know he doesn't want to do it when he chooses to sleep instead. He never chooses sleep.

Me

And my husband.... Oh, my husband. He just doesn't care. Messes, dirt, none of it bothers him. I get twitchy in a cluttered room. He just moves clutter aside and makes a spot to sit and considers it good enough. We've been married a while now, and I have long since given up on asking him to do things my way. Why put socks in the laundry basket when there's a perfectly good floor right in front of it? Why put things in the drawer when you can just set them on top of the counter?

The thing I've realized, is that I'm the only one who values a clean, tidy house. My family members don't care. And ultimately, if it's something that matters to me, I need to take ownership and do it. What I'm also still working on accepting is that I can't reasonably have a home that looks the way I want it to when I'm the only one who values it. I keep trying to come up with a good routine to maintain the house, but it's hard to have a reasonable, doable routine when I have four bathrooms and I think each one should be cleaned twice a week. If it was only bathrooms I had to clean, that would be all well and good, but there's another 3000 or so square feet that need attention to.

Lowered expectations. That's what I need to do. Keep them in line with what I can actually do without making myself crazy.

Blerg

So I got the plague. Ok, ok, not the plague. But I did get strep throat. And that did put me down for the count. Huzzah! I spent the better part of four days curled up in a ball on the couch. A couple of nights I didn't even attempt sleeping in a bed and just stayed cemented to that couch. Thank goodness for a comfortable couch, I suppose.

So here I am on the other side. I'm not feeling as sick, though the effects of antibiotics are not all stellar. But I can actually swallow without difficulty so I think it's a significant step in the right direction. For those couple of days, we were in survival mode. My husband still had to work and the kids were still home with me all the time because school is out. So it was a lot of makeshift, grab what you can and be grateful, kind of dining. Oh, and perhaps some Subway as well, I won't lie. (I also won't lie and deny loving Subway.)

So now that it's officially the new year and I can stay in an upright position for extended periods of time, I can be productive again! I have Big Plans for myself this year. I have some rough ideas for blogging. I have some dietary changes to make and some 'splaining to do to all ya'll nice people. I have some ambitions for our family, and hopefully some of those things will be ironed out in the next few days so I have yet another thing to stress about. I need to make a new chore chart that is actually workable for our house(since moving, I have never been able to iron it out to be reasonable but actually keep the house clean). And even more than that, I need to stick to the chore chart.

Ok, well, there's so much to do that I could totally overwhelm myself just sitting here. But the husband is out watching a movie and the kids are in bed so I have a few things I need to mark off my to-do list. One thing I already completed tonight was setting up the boys' reading lights by their beds. Their bed frames are super thick, so the clamp wouldn't stick which was frustrating. So I trawled Home Depot until I found a bracket type of thing to screw into the bed frame and clamp the light to. It works, and the boys are happy to have reading lights. Now they don't have to suffer through the indignity of getting out of bed to turn off their overhead light.

Homemade detergent! (kinda)

Well, technically I'm making it. But really all that amounts to is mixing it. Cause.... Yea.

So, as nice as it would be to wash my clothing in nothing but vinegar and Ivory soap, I just don't trust that it would cut it. I simply don't. And after my lousy experience with Charlie's, well, I'm not taking chances just yet.

So, I came across a recipe that claims to be like Tide. Well, we'll see about that, but it does seem reasonable.

The recipe calls for an equal ratio of:

-Sun detergent with bleach alternative

-Sun oxygen cleaner

-Borax

-Super washing soda

Each load uses one tablespoon of the mixed detergent.

I procured the items.

Ansel was very excited, and wanted to be in the picture.

Now, here's where I got VERY scientific. Or, not. The products ranged from 55oz. to 77oz. Ehhhh... close enough. I dumped all the containers into my big bucket container.

We mixed. And mixed. And then sealed the container and rolled it and tipped it upside down, and back, and so on. All the products are white powders, so it's not easy to know when it's mixed. This is why it would have been better to make a smaller batch. Oh well. Once it was mixed, I filled a smaller container to keep on the shelf above my washing machine.

I'll start using this tomorrow. I finished off my standard detergent today. I'm going to keep using real Tide on diapers because I just don't play around when it comes to that.

Ah! And there's the awesome news..... I did all the fancy advanced math. And when this is all said and done, this detergent costs........ 2.5 cents per load!

Crunchy Laundry Fail

I've been trying to "green" over a lot of the products we use in our home. I've started switching our bath products over, tried out some "green" cleaning products(as well as using household alternatives, like vinegar), and so on.

And one thing I thought I'd figured out, I discovered I hadn't. Back in the winter sometime, I don't recall when, I started buying Charlie's Soap. At first, it was great! It was a bargain, you only need to use a little bit, our clothes were coming nicely clean and didn't smell strongly of detergent. It was great! I did find that it wasn't cutting it for diaper laundry, so I did keep using regular detergent for that. But otherwise, Charlie's was awesome!

But then a few bags into it, I started to notice that stains weren't coming out like they used to. And the laundry just sort of looked.... dull. And sometimes I was finding I needed to re-wash things to get them really sufficiently clean, and if I have to wash something twice, what's the point?

So I decided to test the theory that it was the Charlie's to blame, and I headed to Target. I didn't want to buy a pricey detergent, but I wanted to get something that looked effective. Enter Arm and Hammer plus Oxi Clean.
Is it eco-friendly? Not likely. Is it super healthy for my family? Probably not. But darn if it didn't clean the clothes.

I would like to, at some point, switch to a greener alternative. But 'green' products are expensive. And I know it'll be a trial and error process to find what works with my washing machine, my family's laundry, our type of water(a little hard, I think), and so on. So there will likely be a few products I buy and reject before finding one that works.

For now, I'd like clean clothes, thank you!