The New Maid

I wish I was making an announcement about the new cleaning lady who'll be coming over to our house once a week...but alas, the cleaning lady is still plain old me, upgraded to Maid 2.0 with a new plan of action.  After our big clean of the house this past weekend, I really, really wanted to get crackin' on the cleaning schedule.  I intended to create one after the last big clean...but it didn't happen.  So I set to work on that yesterday, and after some searching, I found a template that I thought could work for me.  This isn't the first cleaning schedule I've created--my first one was scribbled hastily on a scrap piece of paper, and it stayed in my nightstand drawer for a few moves.  Why was it in my nightstand drawer, you ask?  Because I wrote it after I went to bed late one night, when inspiration hit me and I thought, "I need a cleaning schedule to make life more manageable!"  I crawled out of bed, found a scrap of paper and a pen, and wrote out the bare bones of a plan.  I want to say that was at least 4 years ago?  In case you couldn't guess, a piece of paper shoved in my nightstand has not at all helped me keep my house clean.  That first attempt at a cleaning schedule (and all my research since that has unfortunately not resulted in anything concrete) was at least a little helpful in that it gave me some direction when creating my new, improved cleaning schedule:

it looks good, so I'm hopeful that it's functional as well!

As you can see, the schedule is already hanging on my fridge, right next to our calendar.  I'm hopeful that checking the schedule will become part of my morning routine, so I'll know what's on the docket for the day.  I tried to give myself a lighter load earlier in the week, because Mondays are short days for Abby at school (which therefore cuts into my naptime hours to get anything done), and Tuesdays are busy with Jake's gymnastics in the morning.  I'm not sure how only doing laundry twice a week is going to work out--I will probably have to add extra loads here and there since Dan has a habit of springing things on me (like, "Honey, I'm going to bed since it's almost midnight...oh, I meant to tell you that I spilled coffee all down the front of my uniform today, so I need it to be washed before tomorrow..."), but if I can make it work on Mondays and Thursdays, I'll be pleasantly surprised.  I don't know if you can see the detail of my schedule from that picture, but I put certain tasks in bold font--those are the "deep clean" tasks, and I tried to space them out so that I do light cleaning most days, with one day a week devoted to a deep clean in one area of the house (bathrooms, kitchen, floors, etc).  Hopefully this will keep me from having to "company clean," which has been my ad hoc cleaning schedule for the last few years...and we don't have company over nearly enough to keep this house clean on a regular basis!

The Company Clean--my previous haphazard approach!

I'm sure I've forgotten some crucial things that should be on the schedule, so I will tweak it this month and have a better product next month.  The stars must have aligned to make the timing right on me finally setting up a schedule--yesterday was the first Monday of the month, and I was able to start my schedule on Week 1, Day 1.  That totally pleases the OCD in me!  :)  I had done laundry on Sunday (not knowing my new schedule would call for Monday laundry), so I spent yesterday doing a few more loads, as well as folding and putting it all away!  I know this will make Dan happy--I think one of his least favorite things is overflowing laundry baskets all over the floor.  So I've already checked off the tasks of one day, and the sense of accomplishment I derived from checking them off will definitely keep me on schedule.  Hooray for my new cleaning schedule!  Please tell me I'm not the only person who gets excited about stuff like this!  :)

Watching my Weight

Because I know you all were curious, I was able to find edamame with no problem at the commissary yesterday!  So it wasn't me--it was the fact that they were out of stock when I was looking for it the other day...phew.  I was starting to feel kind of dumb after numerous people informed me that the commissary does in fact carry edamame.  I knew I was tired on that shopping trip, but not that tired...  So perhaps that Lemon-Thyme chicken will be on the docket this week!

Yesterday was weigh-in day, and a true weight assessment from my new scale.  Last week, I weighed 159.6 on my new scale.  This week, I weighed 158.  Since the start of the Challenge 21 days ago, I've lost 5 pounds--that's 1.67 pounds a week.  Not quite 2 pounds a week, but I think I'm doing a decent job--and hey, any loss is good in my book!  I'm getting excited about the prospect of getting under 150 in a month of so (hopefully)--I haven't been under 150 since Dan came home for his 2-week R&R from Iraq in September 2010.  I can't remember what I weighed then exactly, but I'm pretty sure it was under 150--maybe 148?  I don't know, but that's the last time I recall feeling really good about how I looked.

that's funny--I usually find my weight in the pantry

 
I didn't have a disastrous weekend on the Challenge, mostly because we didn't go anywhere with dangerous foods.  I spent 8 hours cleaning the house on Saturday--it desperately needed the cleaning, and we had friends over Saturday evening, so I wanted the house to be in good shape.  Cleaning burns a lot of calories!  Sunday, I had to do my requisite commissary shop in a record-short amount of time because Jake had a make-up gymnastics class and I needed to get home so that Dan could take him--even with finding the edamame, I was in and out in 45 minutes.  The rest of Sunday was for relaxing--I was pretty tired after my cleaning Saturday, so I sat down to watch reruns of Law & Order during naptime (Jack McCoy gets me every time!  Love me some Sam Waterston...).  Since it wasn't a DVR'd show (my usual), I couldn't fast-forward the commercials--and I ended up seeing a commercial for WeightWatchers.  Now, I'm relatively new to the whole calorie-counting thing, and I know WeightWatchers is supposed to be really easy and really great, but their whole point system confuses me.  I was wondering how adhering to their point system could be easier than just plain old counting calories when the name "WeightWatchers" struck me as kind of funny.  I know it's an idiom, as in, "Oh, I can't eat that--I'm watching my weight," but I can't figure out why "watching your weight" became a euphemism for trying to lose weight.  When I'm watching my kids all day, I'm usually not trying to lose one of them.  It seems to me that when you're not watching things, that's when you tend to lose them (at least, that would be the case with kids, keys, and anything else important).  So how watching your weight can make you lose pounds is a confusing concept for me--usually when I watch something closely, I don't notice a difference (a watched pot never boils comes to mind--although that idiom doesn't ring true, either, because if that pot is sitting over high heat, it will eventually boil no matter who is watching!).  I was watching my weight before this Challenge--yep, I was watching it go up.  I did a pretty deep google search, and could not come up with an origin for this particular phrase--I have no idea why "watching my weight" came to mean trying to lose weight.  My best guess is that some enterprising woman decided that it was a more polite and discrete way to tell folks she was on a diet.

exactly.

So yeah, this time around, I'm trying to watch my weight go down, and I'm trying to watch my mouth to make sure ice cream doesn't enter too often.  The kids are most distraught over that last point--last night, Jake said, "Please can we go somewhere for dessert?  We haven't been to ColdStone in a long time...or Dairy Queen.  I love Dairy Queen, Mommy!"  Me too, kid...me too.  I guess I just don't feel safe enough to walk into an ice cream shop yet--could I trust myself to order a kid's sized Peanut Butter Cup Perfection at ColdStone, or a mini Reese's Peanut Butter Cup Blizzard at DQ?  I don't know the answer to that yet.  And even those small sizes aren't good for me--don't worry, I'm not fooling myself!  We will go back again eventually, because life isn't life without the occasional splurge, but I don't know if my willpower is strong enough for that kind of assault just yet!

As an aside, I've decided that I should have been an English major in college, and my senior paper would have been titled something like this:  "American Colloquialisms:  The Origin of Idioms and Their Continued Use Long After Meaning is Lost."  It would have been a page-turner.  Ha!