:lol: From what I read here, most of us are in the same boat, so I take a little comfort from that. It's so frustrating that, just when I see a little progress and get excited that maybe they're figuring it out, BAM! I come into the kitchen after breakfast and find 8 things in the sink. I start to feel kind of like, why am I bothering?! :cursing:

I'm chiming in to sub, and to say that the discussions here have helped me get the dishwasher run every night before bed for the last few nights, and it's been nice to wake up to a relatively clean kitchen in the mornings! Now, if I could just figure out how to get the other people in the household to register the empty dishwasher and put their dang dishes into it instead of the sink... But that's a whole other post!

Shutterfly has those features. IMO, it's even better than FB WRT to the features. But that's the platform we had to abandon to move over to FB, because people just wouldn't check it and we couldn't get business done. If you can get your members onto it, then it should work well for you.

Thank you. That brings up another issue I have. The candy box was brought to me while I was working, so I would have had to get up from my work to deal with it. When I did get up from my work, it was in a sprint to start getting dinner ready, so I thought, "I'll deal with that once the pot's boiling" but of course once I left the room, that was the end of that thought. The mail was left on the table because I was hurrying to get back in the car to take a kid to a doctor's appt, so there was no time to sort and shred right then. It feels like I'm always in a rush to get something bigger going, so those little jobs get pushed aside. If I did all the little jobs, dinner would be at 9:00 at night, we'd be late places, etc. And that's how the little things pile up. I just don't see another way! It's so frustrating. I feel like I'm missing something that's so apparent to other people.

I'm quoting you, but really this is in reference to the other posts as well. This is where I run into trouble again. If I use the bathroom example, I break from school to use the toilet, and while I'm there, I decide the toothpaste bugs me, so I wipe it up. And then mirror is splattery, so I quick spray that down. And someone has let water spray out of the tub and it made a little puddle on the floor, so I'll clean that up too. And a couple of things should get put under the sink, so I put them there. And while I'm under the sink, the garbage is full, so I tie it up. And since I'm going back downstairs, I'll take the garbage and just run it out the bin outside the garage. And while I'm doing that, I'll grab the recycling bin too, since I'm passing it. And once I dump the recycling, I realize the bins are all over the place, so I straighten them up so the recycling's not spilling out of the one accessible bin. And then, of course, the recycling bin has to go back upstairs... These are all two-minute jobs that I could keep doing on and on and on forever, and I'll never get back to the school table where my kid is waiting for me. KWIM? So how do I decide which two-minute job is the one at which I draw the line, even though I see it and should do it, because it's "just two minutes"? That's how I get stuck. I want to be the person who sees the two-minute job and just handles it quickly, but like regentrude said, EVERYTHING is made up of two-minute jobs. I could clean the entire house two minutes at a time...eventually! :lol:

Here it seems to work out that I never manage to get my full attention on them, because I'm trying to put out a million tiny fires. I'll start cleaning up the kitchen or something before the kids get up, and when they do, I'm still in the middle of it because I don't want to walk away or it will never get finished, and then by the time I'm done they're in the middle of something, so while I wait for them I start to do something else...and then it's 3:00 and we have to leave for an appt or no one has any attention span left to do schoolwork effectively. If I do manage to get schoolwork prioritized, when I finally come back upstairs, the kitchen's still a mess from breakfast and the kids making themselves lunch/snacks and I have to clean all that up before I can start dinner, and so on. Hm, these are really good points. There are a few things left over from my childhood that seem to paralyze me because they don't work well with my real, adult life. I can still hear my dad's voice! "Never leave a job unfinished." Or "If it's worth doing, it's worth doing RIGHT." Of course, he never had to run a household or raise kids or homeschool :lol: Thanks for these tips. I'm going to try to re-frame the little things as "things I will deal with in x time frame" rather than "things I should be doing right now, all at once, before I can accomplish anything else."

I'm home alone at the moment, and there's a bunch of it still sitting in the kitchen, and I'm having a very hard time not going in there. I'll be glad when it's gone!

Well, mainly homeschooling and work. Those are the things I should be fitting the cleaning stuff around, but I often feel like I'm trying to fit them around taking care of the house, cooking, running errands, etc.

Maybe this is a perspective thing? I feel like my whole house is made up of two-minute tasks. Right now from the couch (where I'm supposed to be working at my paid job), I can see: an empty candy box that needs to be recycled, a small stack of mail that I need to pick through and get off the dining room table, a bunch of stuff that doesn't belong on the kitchen table, a small stack of board games that need to go back downstairs, a sweater and a jacket that need to get hung up... As I move through my day, I see stuff like this and think, "I should just deal with that right now, as I'm standing here," but then I'll never get to sit down and spend an hour on my paid work before I have to start dealing with dinner or whatever. Am I looking at this the wrong way?

I'm trying to do better with housekeeping, and I know that it's generally recommended that if there's something you can do in under 2 minutes, you should just do it right then so the little things don't pile up. But am I the only one who feels like, if you just do all the little tasks right when you see them, you'll never get to the big ones? Am I missing something in the bigger picture? I work from home, and I'm HSing two kids who still seem to need me a lot, and I feel like big tasks are always waiting for me, so I abandon the smaller ones to get to the bigger things because they're more pressing...but then that's how my house ends up looking like a nuclear war zone. I was really hoping the new year would bring an extra hour or so each day, but it doesn't look like I got my wish! :willy_nilly:

DP

:smilielol5: Occasionally my DD12 will say something like, "When I was a kid..." and I just want to fall over laughing.

:lol: I just told the kids yesterday that we were going to have an "eat weird food" night soon. We have a bunch of random things that need to get used up: one last chicken tender, two breaded fish filets, a couple of veggie burgers, some quinoa/beans/corn that I made (that I suspect I'll be the only one eating), etc. I love the term "bizarre buffet" though. I think I may steal it! -------------------------------- OK, I've started posting a couple of times and got pulled away, but I really need some accountability, so I'm jumping in here. We've done really well so far this month, but last night I cave to the request for pizza because the new place we've been waiting for finally opened, and I had a coupon. Except there is NO WAY those pizzas are even close to 11 inches (we measured them at a smidge over 9--the BOXES aren't even 11 inches :glare:), so my plan for us to share wasn't going to work. And I got sucked in by the brownie pie, so between ordering an extra pizza and the brownie pie, my spending went from the planned $9 or so to $27 :banghead: Needless to say, we won't be going back there, which is good because the brownie pie was incredible, and I should avoid it at all costs. Today DH is taking DD to a class and he and DD12 will go to the science center, but that's money out of the Family Fun budget category, and tomorrow we have tickets to a musical and will need dinner out, so that will come out of the Outside Food category. Other than that, I'm staying home and working and eating quinoa, beans, and corn, so no anticipated expenses! 9: Groceries (budgeted): $47 10: Disappointing pizza: $27 11: Class fee: $50 (budgeted); Science center entry and lunch: TBD

I really have to wonder if everyone who avoids FB for the philosophical reasons also avoids all Google products? http://bgr.com/2016/02/11/why-facebook-and-google-mine-your-data-and-why-theres-nothing-you-can-do-to-stop-it/

Can your son have a FB account, or are you opposed to FB entirely? I can say that as a co-leader of a group like that, the people who don't want to use FB to keep up with the group don't fare too well. I understand the philosophical oppositions to FB, but frankly, it is the easiest way to manage group communications. We used to use another method, but people would ignore it or not check and then complain they were missing communications or email a million questions that were already answered via our communication page. We switched over to FB, but now we have people who don't want to use FB and want personal emails. We can't win. FB has the features we need and most of the members are on there, so FB it is. We are volunteers, and we are already turning ourselves inside out to run this group. We can't personally cater to individual members. I'm sorry that it's making things difficult for you, but I don't see what else you can do. If you can't rely on a friend, you're going to have to go with the method the group prefers or miss out.

Thank you for coming back and updating! I'm so glad it went so well. And that your results are clear!!!!

I make mushroom stock as a base. It's not exactly the same, but it's delicious. You could maybe use half mushroom, half veggie or chicken. I buy the Westbrae white miso from Whole Foods (but I'm sure they sell it elsewhere too). I believe you're supposed to heat the stock and then mix the miso in afterward--I do notice that it tastes better that way. Be forewarned that eating too much miso soup can cause some unexpected digestive issues. We discovered that after I learned how to make a version we liked at home and enjoyed it a little too much for a few days!

Thank you for sharing (and way to go, mama!). I am clinging to your story with all my might! :willy_nilly:

Good grief. I wonder if the victim is his wife? I really think the truth is probably a tiny percentage of whatever he thinks happened. His perception seems so out of whack that I don't think we can take anything he says seriously.

If you do, I have a favor to ask! I bought a used copy on eBay, and I'm starting to plan it (loading lessons into HST). I just discovered that my lesson plans skip weeks 4-6 :glare: Could someone possibly take a photo or scan a copy of their weeks 4-6 and send it to me? I'm currently using a set with a 2013 copyright (scheduling Myers' Psychology along with the Straub study guide and the Interactive Workbook and Diary). If you can help, PM me and I'll send you my email address or phone number for texting. Thank you so much in advance!

Ha! Seriously. I pretty much stopped shopping there years ago after the front end manager basically accused me of stealing when I was trying to use coupons within their own policy.

WOW :huh: I don't think I'm going to tell DH about this.

Are you shopping at a Shoprite, by any chance? They are famous for wanting to portray themselves as coupon friendly but actually being incredibly miserable to deal with. And they're often owned by individual owners or groups, so they're never all on the same page as the corporate office, It's very frustrating.

You're not alone. I'm just chiming in here so I can find this thread when I have time to come back and read it. I will say that what usually helps me is getting rid of as much stuff as possible. It weighs me down horribly. It keeps creeping back though! :lurk5:

The way you're describing this, it's starting to sound a little like OCD. Has she had trouble with that kind of behavior in other ways?