Norwex

No. I do not sell Norwex. I do not care if you buy Norwex. But I will say I decided to try it recently, and so far I have been pleased. It is especially convenient for me since I have been potty training  my three-year-old. I keep one envirocloth in the bathroom to use cleaning up stinky boy pee that might leak from the potty chair or from the potty maker somehow. After I use it I just rinse it out well and then hang it to dry. I have been using it for a week and have cleaned up multiple spills and it still does not smell like pee. Obviously, I won't use it anywhere besides the bathroom floor/potty before I wash it, but supposedly you could clean up some pee, rinse the cloth well and then use it on your face or wherever. I think I would try it on someone else's face….

Post Office

 Did you know that if a package is going to be sent Priority Mail, USPS will come pick it up for you? I was returning something by mail today and the postage was already marked Priority. Instead of having to go to the post office or a dropbox I just scheduled a pickup.  And now I feel like a pampered Princess it is nice sometimes.

If you are in Livermore, I will let you in on a not-so-secret. You never have to go to the downtown post office. Just go to the one at the Portola Gas Station.  There is never a line, even during the holidays, and it is on the way to Costco from where we live!

Workflow

I spend a good portion of my day cleaning up the floor after feeding Stuey. It is important to keep the floor clean, so that the Cheerios and other goodies don't get tracked all over the house. I hate vacuuming, so I would rather sweep it up before it spreads. Instead of having to go get the broom from the garage, I decided to use a hook that is a command strip to put a mini broom on the back of the highchair. It may not seem like a big deal, but it definitely helps the workflow!
Now I just need a little shelf nearby so I can keep the container of wipes right underneath the highchair instead of on the counter. If I were a designer, I totally know how I would want my highchair built.

'Tis a gift to be simple – relief society renewal

Last weekend, we had a relief society renewal that was about making life simple. Cynthia Nielsen gave a lesson about simplicity, and had some great points. Here are some of the points that she shared.
– Keep things simple to have time for goals.
– Simplicity is relative. But may be simple for somebody else, may be stressful or complicated for me, and vice versa.
– Ask for help before you need it. It's like staying on top of the pain when you in the hospital.
– Cynthia gave her husband credit for this one: the one and a half rule. Estimate the time and resources that it's going to take you to do something, and then times that by 1 1/2 to get the true time it will probably take.
– Busyness does not equal righteousness (Pres. Uchtdorf October 2012 Gen. Conference session)
– Sometimes we have to simplify our traditions when they get too complicated as the family grows.
– It's okay to have frozen pizza for Sunday dinner.
– We need to have the Spirit to be our curator to help us choose the most valuable things to focus on and to do.
– To evaluate the importance of an activity we need to first ask ourselves what is the priesthood and family reason for the activity?
– Don't worry about what other people are thinking. That is what often gets us into trouble.
– She recommends a book, but I cannot remember the exact name. Part of it is called "the quest for contentment".
– I thought this was funny – Cynthia pointed out that we women, with our corpus callosum, tend to be very good at multitasking but also very distractible. We have to reign in the distractions to actually get things done sometimes.

I am glad that I could go to the relief society renewal. It was a great time!

Keeping things simple

Things that matter most. Here is a great talk about it:

http://www.lds.org/ensign/2010/11/of-things-that-matter-most?lang=eng

Painless er... stainless steel

Four words: stainless steel shower caddy

I am normally a cheapskate, but my stainless steel shower caddy was worth the $25. It means I don't have to waste time or energy (especially hand intensive scrubbing) on trying to get the rust off of my shower caddy. Love it!

Touch it once

When it comes to cleaning -- touch it once!

This idea is from Don's brother, Rick Dowdle. I am not sure if he made it up, if he got it from his mom, or what. Cleaning is made a lot easier if you clean up along the way. For example, say I want to clean up the living room. I am tempted to take some of Stuey’s items and just toss them into his room to take care of them later, but honestly that makes another job for me to do. It is far easier to just walk a little faster and put the items where they belong. If I'm cooking eggs, instead of during the egg shells into the sink to rest until I do the dishes, I can put them directly into the compost container, which is under the sink. It seems like it would just be obvious, but it helps me when I consciously think of eliminating steps.


This book that I once read, The Art of Homemaking, suggested something similar. The author reminds us that it is easier to immediately clean up a jam jar that has stickiness on the outside, than it is to later clean all the services that it touched, and have to scrub the stickiness off. Good point.