Not My Mother

A lot of my blogs have been setting their goals for next year, so I’ve been trying to come up with mine. It’s hard because I have no idea how next year will go. I could say that about every one of the last 6 years, but this one will definitely be different. I’ll become a mother. I’ll be moving to a part-time salary, and although I’ve worked out a tentative budget that shows we can do things quite comfortably, I have no idea how out of pocket we’ll end up with the birth, or how much the baby will cost (although Mum’s gone a bit mad buying stuff and friends have been very generous, so that helps out.) Hell, I have no idea at all what being a mother will do to me or my life, so it really is all up in the air right now.

I’ve not really tried setting goals before. Resolutions, sure, I make a billion of those, and promptly forget them. One year I had 13. How many did I achieve? Your guess is as good as mine. So for the last few years I’ve not bothered making them. Best to avoid the sense of failure. But I can see the point of setting goals, especially financial ones, otherwise you drip through the year with no focus. But how to do it? Goals should be achievable and measurable and everything else that makes them SMART. Also, I don’t want to have a goal for each aspect of my life (too much to focus on), but neither do I want just one financial one (an area that IS measurable) that I’ll get obsessive about, I’m obsessive enough about that already. So what to do?

I was talking to Dave about it and he gently pointed out that I am a knucklehead and next year WILL have one main focus, and it won’t be finances. We are becoming parents, everything is going to change. Thus, 2010’s goal should be to adjust to parenthood.

Spend the first three months preparing for the baby, then recover from the birth and adjust to being a mother. Look, I have no idea how I’ll go with that, other than it will change everything for ever (thanks, friends with helpful comments). I’ll probably be overwhelmed by it all and I’ll likely get postnatal depression. So he says I need to forget everything else and concentrate on that, get settled into being mum, get healthy and well, get our routines going and so on. And he’s right. I know he’s right. It’s really important and it doesn’t come at all naturally to me, I need to give it all my focus.

But I’ll need some sub-projects to keep me going, right? You know, for when it all that parenting gets too easy? So here are a few more I came up with.

Finance

1. Get emergency fund up to $20,000.My ultimate goal is $30,000 (6 months full expenses including mortgages for rental properties), but I’ll aim for $20,000 by the end of next year. It is currently sitting at $9,500, so we can comfortably make $20k by adding about $1000 a month.
2. Work out exact financial position. I’m embarrassed to say I don’t really know where we stand at the moment. I’ve lost track of how many shares we have (we get some as part of our end of year bonuses, usually held in trust for a year or more, and I’ve not kept the records of what’s vested and what’s not, up to date), and some of our old superannuation funds have old addresses so I haven’t got up to date statements from them. Plus, Dave tends to be a bit slack with some stuff like managing the account for paying one of the investment mortgages, which makes it hard for me to know how the budget’s going, so I’d rather just get it all under my control.

   This one also means making sure we’ve got everything covered that we should, like life insurance and wills, and to start getting educated on our superannuation options.

3. Grow net worth by $50,000. Again, I don’t know what the current year will bring so I don’t know how realistic I’m being, but if we include superannuation contributions (as we must) this should be easily achievable. It will be hard to definitely assess our success because a lot would depend on property valuations and I can’t see us paying for new ones again next year, but we’ll do what we can. For the record, I did some sums and I estimate our current net worth as being somewhere around the $490-500,000 mark, so $50k would be a nice round 10% increase. (See why I need the exact financial position? $500k would be such a nice milestone to hit and I don’t know if we’ve made it yet!)

Organisation – get home life in order

This one ties into the main goal of adjusting to parenthood, and just getting our lives working smoothly so things don’t fall apart when I go back to work. One of my most common freakouts is that I don’t feel like I’m coping now, so how will I manage when there’s a baby to wrangle as well? So this is all about setting up routines and systems, like meal plans and filling the freezer so we have food, and getting housework and admin down to a quick art. It bugs me that I always have a big list of things hanging over my head that should be done, so I want to make a concerted effort to work through them all and get them sorted out once and for all.

(And before you point and laugh at me for thinking I can do that with a baby around, she won’t be here for a few months yet and hopefully will sleep a lot at first. I could be kidding myself, but leave me my illusions for now, okay?)

Health and wellbeing

Dave says he wants to get down to 85kg (um, about 187lb) by the end of the year. He’s 6 feet tall with a chunky muscular build anda bit of a belly and probably weighs about 104kg (229lb) at the moment. I can’t imagine him that light but he thinks he can do it, and it will help with his cycling. I was 85.9kg (189lb) when we got married and am 94kg (207lb) right now, so I figure I’ll target that too. Ideally I’d like to get under 76kg (168lb) which would get me out of the obese range for my height, but I honestly don’t know how I’ll go. I’d rather have a modest goal I have a hope of achieving than something I don’t believe I can do.

Really though, I’d just like to finish the year feeling fitter and healthier, with better food and exercise habits and a body that doesn’t hurt. This will be part of establishing our new routines. Details still to be worked out.

So that’s it. Of course I’m most interested in the financial ones right now because I’m comfortable in that area. I’m actually quite excited about what next year will bring,

What do you think of these goals? What are your goals for the coming year?

Wait, I’ve not written in here for 11 days? I thought it was about a week, tops. Sorry about that!

I has been busy, busier than 10 busy things. Okay, not that busy. Maybe 6 busy things. Let’s see – we went to visit our new niece and admired how cute the top of her head, which was the only part of her we could see, was. It still amazes me that in a few months’ time I’ll have one of those of my own. Speaking of which, in the last week my belly has popped out and I now look distinctly (six months) pregnant, rather than just fat. And I booked us into some Hypnobirthing classes in January. That’s been on my todo list for a while and I worried I’d left it too late to get us in, so it was a relief to get it done. I’m quite excited about it, it teaches you techniques to help you relax, and him things he can do to help you and to not piss you off, which is important. The idea is that fear makes you tense up which makes everything hurt more, so if you’re prepared with knowledge of what’s actually happening to you and the relaxation techniques, you can avoid the fear and thus the pain. One of my girlfriends used it with great results and I’ve heard other good things as well. I don’t expect it to give me a completely pain-free delivery, I’m a bit of a wuss and not very good at relaxing and switching off, but I figure it can only help so I might as well try it.

The truth is I have no idea how this is all going to turn out and I cannot visualise giving birth at all, which unnerves me, so my philosophy is to chuck everything at this pregnancy in the hope it will help. Thus I see an osteopath, had a Lomi Lomi massage, do yoga (but not often enough) and am also going to start acupuncture in the new year. At the very least they are all good for me and help calm me down, so I’m going to enjoy them without guilt.

Christmas – the hard work is all done. Gifts all bought, wrapped, and put under the decorated tree; most of the grocery shopping’s done, everyone knows what they need to bring. All that’s left is for me to buy a couple of chickens and a few odds and ends, and give the house a quick tidy and vacuum on Thursday afternoon while Dave’s driving down to Ballarat to pick up my mum. I’m hoping I can keep it relaxed and enjoyable like the Christmasses we had on our own in England, and kind of how they are with Dave’ family, and not at all the fussfest my mum makes it.

You know what always surprises me, and has again while we’ve been preparing for this? How some jobs can seem so huge and daunting, but when you knuckle down and do them they really don’t take that much time at all. take our spare room, which I needed to get ready for mum to stay in. It was filled with boxes, there was linen dumped all over the bed and floor, and I had no idea where the doona and pillows were. Sorting it out has been hanging over me for weeks. But Dave stacked the boxes to the side and while he cleared up the garden on Saturday I folded all the towels and bedsheets and organised them into the linen cupboard. It took  me less than an hour and it was fun. (I love organising.) Now the spare room looks lovely. I mean, Mum will still complain comment because the queensize spare bed is a bit too big and has to be pushed against the wall but there’s not a lot I can do about that. And then there’s our laundry. It was the dumping ground for all the odds and ends and I figured I’d just have to write it off, but Dave had a spare 20 minutes on Sunday and managed to pull everything out and reorganise it neatly. He even unpacked our wine! In twenty minutes! I keep having to go in and admire it, it looks so lovely.

So here is my anti-procrastination tip for you kiddies: If you do it, it will get done. As it was for the spare room and the laundry and booking the birth classes, so it can be for everything else on my list? Well bugger me, who knew.

So that’s my big new lesson learned. (Again.) Other than that we’ve been really busy doing a couple of months’ worth of socialising in the last week, and I’ve been stroking my spreadsheets and thinking about our goals for next year. Which I’ll tell you all about next time. Stay tuned, it’s pretty exciting.

You know, I am getting really tired of waking up in the middle of the night to spend an hour or so fretting about stuff. Often it’s not even stuff I need to worry about, but my mind keeps spinning around on it anyway. Like, the other night it was about Christmas, which we are hosting this year. I was stressing over the timing of the meal and when I should put the sprouts on to cook. I am not even serving sprouts! And last night it was something about getting a move on making maternity shirts from some patterns I bought a couple of weeks back because time is moving on, you know. And Saturday morning I was up at 5am because I couldn’t sleep from thinking about all the paperwork piling up on my desk.

See, they are really stupid things but underlying them is stuff I do need to worry about. I do need to organise for Christmas and for the baby, and even general stuff won’t wait. Unfortunately this goes against my natural state of slothful procrastination, hence everything piles up and up while I loll around watching tv, until I start waking up unable to breathe.

Also, I don’t do well with multitasking. I can concentrate on one thing at a time but if I try to do several things I end up thrashing around trying to work out which to do first. So, I can spend a weekend happily unpacking and arranging my kitchen, or I can do all the filing; but try to get me to unpack a box and do the ironing and research childcae options for the year after next (seriously – apparently we were behind on this the moment we conceived) and I crash and burn. Thusly: our situation here.

You know what I need? A list! Actually I need many lists. One time, during a really stressful project, I made myself a “list of lists to make”. And my friend Connell found my list of lists, and he pointed and laughed at me. Actually pointed and laughed! But screw him, that worked better than one big list. And then I need to actually look at the lists every day, and give myself 2-3 tasks that can be done, and I need to choose them in order of priority not just what I feel like doing. So the scary things I hate and which I always procrastinate on will get done as well as making all my files look pretty. And if you’re really lucky I’ll post my lists and  my wins so you can see how I’ve gone.

So: here’s my list of lists I think I need, and my tasks for today. It’s important not to put too many things on the list, otherwise I get anxious and I am supposed to be working as well.

Lists I need [you can call them "task categories" if you want]:

• Christmas organisation
• Baby preparation
• Finance to do
• General to do
• Dave to do [he'd never admit it, but he procrastinates worse than I do, so I find giving him one job per day gets stuff done without me feeling like a nag]

Just writing those makes me feel all organised and tingly! Just wait until there are actual tasks in them too!

Today’s tasks:

1. Find and print form for Dave’s UK tax return (one of the things that woke me up on Saturday)
2. Buy book for mum’s Christmas present
3. Get electoral enrollment form witnessed and post
4. write blog :-)

Weekend wins

1. balanced money accounts
2. did mending while watching Deadwood (not high priority but at least I wasn’t just sitting on the couch)
3. registered for Medicare Online and updated details
4. updated some addresses and sent Dave list of ones which are easily changed online
5. did about half our Christmas shopping
6. tested roasting a chicken in the new oven for Christmas

What about you, are you lazy? How do you keep on top of everything that needs to be done?

Well, there were 15 boxes of books (they are little boxes, honest), and Dave’s old study took medium 10 boxes to pack up, and I’m pretty sure mine was about the same, so that’s what, 35 present and accounted for. And there were probably eight or so of assorted kitchen stuff, so that’s 43, so that only leaves, um, thirteen that I can’t guess to the contents. But I’m sure it’s all really important stuff!

Actually, I’m hoping to cull a lot of it. I have a lot of STUFF that I don’t really need, but is really hard to let go of. I tried to declutter my study when I was packing but apart from dropping a couple of old programming textbooks into the recycling (I’m pretty sure NO ONE wants to know about coding in Pascal anymore), I didn’t really manage anything. But! Now we have to share one study instead of having one each, so I’m expecting that unpacking will go more like, “okay where does this thing go? Bugger it, it’s too hard, let’s just put it in this bin bag instead.” And don’t even mention possibly ebaying the things I don’t want, I’m sure there’s a whole subset of crap already in this category in those boxes.

Anyway, so I managed to unpack about five or six boxes of kitchen stuff, and I found places for it all, and it looks lovely! I love a well-stocked kitchen. There’s still a couple of boxes to go but they’re all about half done already as we needed things so they shouldn’t take too long. Next weekend we’ll tackle the debacle which is the pantry and then it will be DONE and BEAUTIFUL and I’ll spend my time opening cupboard doors and marvelling at the sparkly innards, until I mess it all up again in about a month.

Dave was busy too, he started putting together our study and dragged everything out of the front little bedroom, which we’ll be using as the nursery. Which is brilliant, except he dumped every single box into the spare room, and now I can’t get in to reach anything, like towels, or bedlinen, that I’d dumped on the spare bed until I got around to sorting out the linen cupboard. But that’s all part of the plan, apparantly, and at least now we can see the nursery, which is good because we really should get a move on with painting it and working out what the heck we need to buy for this baby, because I’ve been told giving birth is not something I can procrastinate on.
But, the kitchen! Have I mentioned how lovely it all looks, all organised and nice? And I can now walk into the games room as well, and see actual floor! Ah, it feels really nice. All I want to do now is get on and sort out the other boxes, bugger this going to work and sleeping and stuff.

During May I am following FLYlady’s 31-day Beginner’s Babysteps, and reporting on my progress.

I was actually busy at work today. Busy! So I didn’t have time to look at FLYlady until I got home. Luckily today’s job is just to write down our tasks on post-its and leave them where we can see them in the kitchen and the bathroom. This is the start of our ‘control journal’.

Um, I don’t know about you but I feel pretty stupid writing “get dressed to shoes” and sticking it on the mirror. I mean, I might as well put, “underpants go first!” or something. I tried writing affirmations once and putting them where I could see them but I got selfconscious at the idea of people (Dave) seeing and judging. Yet my OCD part won’t let me skip this day. Is it better to follow FLYlady (and thus ingrain my habits) or let go of the urge to follow instructions exactly? I don’t know.

So instead I’ve made a little chart with the tasks on it and a box for each day. I’ll leave it on my dressing table and tick things off as I do them. It looks like this:

I tried this once before and found that if I have a table like this to tick off it makes it easier for me to follow and meet my goals. The problem is, if I don’t see it, I don’t do it. Last time it was on my desk where it got lost under piles of stuff. So, this time, it must live on the dressing table. I’ve added the vitamins because I keep forgetting to take them. And the flossing because I really need to, and I forget. I did resist adding 15 other tasks to the list like I usually do. This is a slow process, if I want it to work I have to be patient.

So I am taking the system and adapting it to my needs. Go me!

During May I am following FLYlady’s 31-day Beginner’s Babysteps, and reporting on my progress.

One thing I forgot when signing up for this is real life gets in the way. Yes, May has 31 days just like the babysteps program, but some days I’m just not going to be able to do it.

Yesterday (Sunday) I went up to Mt Buller to try skiing for the first time. It was a spur of the moment trip; a friend convinced us to go despite my reservations that I wasn’t fit enough, that I’d hurt myself, that I just wouldn’t be able to do it and would end up rolling down the mountain like a giant snowball with limbs. As it turned out it wasn’t a success and I ended up bailing pretty early for various reasons which are probably worth a post of their own. Of course Dave was brilliant at it and wants to go again soon. He is annoying like that.

Regardless it was a lovely day and I’m glad I went, but we were out from before dawn until after dinner so I didn’t have a chance to do anything on FLYlady. So I’m doing Day 3 today. I thought of just saying I did it, it’s so easy, but that’s cheating. There’s a principle involved, you know?

All we have to do today is get dressed to lace up shoes, shine our sink, and spend 2 minutes reading our reminders. That’s it.

The reminders come in one email these days (it used to be several during the day) and remind you of your monring and evening routines, the day’s task and the month’s habit. It’s all very intriguing and makes me feel organised even though I’m not doing any of it yet. I’m also envious of people who are home all day, these SHEs (Sidetracked Home Executives, see the cutseyness is starting already) who can find time to do the tasks and decletter and all sorts. I mean, obviously they can’t, mostly, that’s why they’re on the list; but once they do start… all that time to organise! It sounds like bliss.

I feel like I’m cheating. This isn’t very hard yet, and I only put on shoes today to go to work. I should do the daily 15 minute task but today’s is to clean out the bin and it sounds like too big a job, it is daunting me to haul it upstairs to the bath. Which is probably FLYlady’s point exactly.

During May I am following FLYlady’s 31-day Beginner’s Babysteps, and reporting on my progress.

So today is day 1 of my FLYlady experiment, and the task today is to shine my sink. As in, take all the dishes out, clean it, and leave it all polished and without water drips. She says this will give us a sense of accomplishment, that even if everything else is a mess at least there’s order here, and that eventually that little spot of order will spread out and take over the rest of the house. I have to admit, the sink does look lovely when it’s clean.

(I have a confession to make. I didn’t do this today. I read ahead last night while Dave was out nerding, and did it then. Cheat! There was a chance we’d be going out tonight and how rubbish would it be to fall behind on the first day? Also, I’m not quite ready to tell him I’m doing FLYlady again. Maybe I won’t tell him at all, and see if he notices.)

Anyway, FLYlady’s instructions have you filling up your sink with bleach and letting it sit, then cleaning it with ajax or similar. Now, I once had a white plastic sink which needed that treatment weekly, but I don’t think it’s necessary on a stainless steel jobby. Here’s what I suggest:

1. fill sink with a little bit of hot water and some dishwashing liquid
2. take your dishwashing sponge (or a sponge with a scouring side) and just have at it. You want to get the soap scum, the old bits of food, and the water stains off, and this works pretty well. Do the walls and bottom of the sink, the draining board, and don’t forget the taps.
3. then FLYlady suggests using something pointy to run around the edge of the sink and the taps to get the black stuff off, but don’t get all OCD about it (like I do). Give it a scrub with your scourer, it will still be better than it was before
4. rinse everything off and wipe down with a towel. Oooh, look how beeyoootiful!

FLYlady says your sink will look so lovely you’ll want to keep it that way, and I can see that’s true. Then she goes a bit mad and suggests not allowing anyone to put dishes in your beautiful treasure. Instead, she says to keep a box in the cupboard below it and put the dishes in there. Um NO! I can see what will happen. Out of sight does indeed mean out of mind and soon you’ve got a drawer full of matter and plates gaining sentience. What a dangerous thing to suggest! So instead, this is my plan: I will empty the dishwasher soon after it’s run and use that as my ‘drawer’. All non-dishwasherable dishes will stand neatly on the bench next to the sink to be dealt with, and I won’t freak out if Dave puts his bowl in the sink instead of leaning down like he does every frickin day.

But what if I don’t have a dishwasher?
It doesn’t matter, you can still do it. Our old kitchen in London had no dishwasher, and very little bench space with none at all near the sink, so dishes were either left spread everywhere (me) or piled up in the sink like a bad tetris game (Dave). I particularly hated how he did that. Firstly, I always had to take the dishes out and put them back on the bench anyway so why bother? Secondly, there’s something about a bunch of dirty dishes next to a rack of clean ones that squicks me out. So I hated it. On the other hand, Dave hated how I left things spread out like water so it does take all types. For my part I would try to stack the dishes neatly on the bench, and he–well, he kept balancing them on top of each other. Oh well.

Anyway, our routine became thus: dishes had to be done every night after dinner, by whoever didn’t cook. I liked to do them straight away so I could enjoy the evening; Dave would leave them till just before bed so I’d be sitting twitching and wondering if he’d forget. It didn’t matter. The important thing is, you’re not faced with a kitchen full of dishes when you get up in the morning. And no, we didn’t dry them. They’d be left to air dry and be put away the next day, preferably before the next lot were dirtied (see squicky, above). We also didn’t bother doing the dishes during the day, but if we cooked something complicated it was seen as manners to clean up as you went.

Either way, at the end of the day you’re left with a clean sink and the dishes (mostly) done, barring a cup or two. And it really does make a difference to how you feel in the morning, when the kitchen is tidy and the sink is not filled with odd bits of stuck-on pasta. So… verdict: good. Job done.

We had a compulsory department meeting this afternoon and it was so interesting I added two full pages of things to my to-do list. One is full of finance-related things I need to sort out (from closing old UK bank accounts to working out what the hell my superannuation is worth now, if anything, to archiving MS-Money), and the other is organisation stuff for the house.

I’m pleased both because I don’t think there’s any duplication between this and my ‘official’ to-do list, and because I wrote stuff down without worrying about the ‘perfect’ order to do things in. And I wrote it so neatly! I’ll just add these pages to the notebook. Without rewriting. I tell you, this day is so full of wins. Oh! And at lunchtime I whizzed round and did four different errands, instead of getting all the way to one and deciding I can’t be bothered today.

I’ve come out of the meeting feeling all excited and it’s only partly due to the ra-ra pep talk we just had. Yay me!

Have you heard of FLYlady? It’s a website dedicated to helping you organise and declutter your home through little daily habits and short 15 minute tasks. Their motto is ‘you can do anything for 15 minutes’, and that is a nice mindset to get into.

I first found it a couple of years ago and followed it religiously for a fair while, and then intermittently afterwards. I’m not sure why I lapsed. Dave was a bit alarmed at the time, but I loved it. If you can get past the saccharine cuteness of the acronyms and nicknames (eg FLY = Finally Love Yourself), it’s actually got some really good advice.

So lately I’ve been I’m thinking of doing it again. I could use some help getting the routine stuff done every day, and there’s nothing better than a little 15-minute task to make you feel like you’re in control. I mean, if you can take 15 minutes to get something that little bit more organised, life must be pretty ok, yes?

There are 3 parts to the FLYlady system:

1 The Website
I used to be terrified of the website. For someone so gung ho about decluttering it had a very messy design and I had no idea how to find anything. It seems a little better now though. There is a lot of information on there but the Getting Started section is a good place to, well, start. It has links to the other 2 parts, namely:

2. The Mailing List
The mailing list on yahoogroups is a mix of daily reminders of habits, a short task for the day, testimonials, and plugs for products. Many of the testimonials come from teary women (in Purple Puddles) who tell how they almost lost their kids to the Child Protection Agency because they couldn’t find them under the clutter. Then of course, they found FLYlady. These make me scared about the state of some people’s homes, and at the same time cheer me up because at least mine isn’t that bad.

You don’t have to buy any of the products, but that duster does sound pretty good…

3. The Beginner Babysteps
This is a 31-day program to ease you into the FLYlady mindset with a small task to do every day. I remember liking this last time as it helps you build up your routines a bit at a time, and stops you being overwhelmed. You don’t need to do these, you can just do the daily tasks from the mailing list, but I recommend it because it teaches you about FLYlady’s philosophy. So to start off I’m going to do the Babysteps program, starting this Friday because it’s going to fit perfectly into May, and I’ll report my results here as I go.

By the way, I’ve been a bit cynical but when you get past all the tweeness it’s a bloody good system and I’m looking forward to following it again. And between you and me, sometimes it’s quite nice to be surrounded by all that genuine warmth and support, you know?

Well I was completely blindsided by that cold there for a while. I’m still not sure if it was an actual cold or a reaction to the flu shot; it did come on really quickly but I was already feeling a bit off the day before and it was a bit extreme for a “general unwell” feeling. It doesn’t matter, either way I’m over it now and I’ll probably not bother getting a flu shot again.

Anyway, so I didn’t get much done on my goals for the rest of last week. But! I did get some fund stuff done on the weekend. On Saturday Dave toddled off to the Grand Prix and I sat down with a coffee and toasted muffin and sorted through all the wedding presents, making a proper list of exactly who gave us what, and working out what we had duplicates of. And then I pulled everything out of my saucepan cupboard and reorganised it and everything fit in with room to spare, and ooh, but it is beautiful.

It’s been so exciting opening the wedding presents. Everything’s really cool! I said that to Dave and he looked at me like I was an idiot and said, “maybe that’s because you picked it all.” Then he called me a doofus and said while we were on the subject why exactly did we need twelve different casserole dishes? I said there weren’t twelve there were only seven, at least that we were given, and of course we needed them because they were all different sizes and therefore good for different things. And I ignored the second part of his question which was about the extra sugar bowls and teapots, and pointed out how nice the casserole dishes looked in my lovely freshly organised cupboard.

Organised cupboards! Is there anything more beautiful? I keep opening the doors to admire what I’ve done. Now I’m wondering how I can make sure Dave puts everything back where it goes, instead of in whichever blank spot looks closest. I’m considering taking photos of each shelf and sticking them to the inside of the doors, or possibly painting shapes like you get on toolboards.