Nablopomo post no. 15 - cleaning marathons and rest days.

At one point I was a devotee of FLYLady's method of cleaning and keeping house. I found I had to keep adapting it and adapting it yet again to fit my lifestyle and schedule until it looked very different from her program. Instead of going by the Julian calendar for the basis of my cleaning schedule, I switched to the lunar cycle. There's more consistency in the lunar cycle than there is in the Julian calendar, which makes things easier for me.

I have four major living areas in my home. I was including the entryway but because I wasn't getting paid for the work and it still looked awful when I was done because of dirt ground into the paint, I gave up. Nowadays I sweep the space with a glance and just go out of it. Between filthy neighbors who throw their trash everywhere and the fact that I can't get it truly clean, there's no point. (My eldest son did me a big favor pulling the trash the neighbors dumped into the garden out of there last week.)

My four living areas are the kitchen, bathroom, bedrooms, and the living room. The week after the new moon, I work on the kitchen. The week of the waxing gibbous moon, I work on the bathroom. The week of the full moon, I work on the living room. And the week of the waning gibbous moon, I work on bedrooms.

To some this may look like madness and that I'm engaged in panic cleaning for the whole month. But that's not completely true. The three days around the new and the full moon, I have a rest period. If a holiday falls during the week, I take a day off from cleaning to observe it. And I'm not spending all day cleaning, just 15 to 30 minutes. I have been trying to get my sons in on this. My eldest is finally starting to fall into the rhythm of it. He's been helping out with daily chores like dishes. We work on them for 15 minutes and then he's done. My youngest is still very scattershot about cleaning. When he focuses and stays on task he does a great job. But that ADHD makes it hard for him to focus. Beloved and I think it is a maturity thing and over the next two years he'll make some leaps and start falling into the cleaning rhythm too.