Monday Q&A | Routine Baking, Whole-House Decluttering, and Habits

How often do you bake bread and make yogurt and any other foods that you make on a regular basis?

-Sloan

I bake rolls and breadsticks and such on a very haphazard basis, depending on what we’re having for dinner. There’s no rhyme or reason there!

I do have a routine for whole wheat sandwich bread and homemade yogurt, though…I make 3 loaves of bread and a gallon of yogurt on Friday mornings. Generally speaking, that lasts us about a week (well, the yogurt usually does. Sometimes we run out of bread and I have to bake more midweek).

I saw that you did a whole house declutter last summer. This is in my plans this summer and I was wondering how you went about deciding what to do first. I tend to get overwhelmed with the scope of such a project. Did you come up with a plan? Did you do one room each day? How deep did you go? (drawers, under the beds etc) Now that we’ve been in this house 6 years, my lack of deeper decluttering is starting to show. I told my husband that either I needed to set aside time to declutter the attic or we needed to move!

-Leigh Ann

I’m planning to get this done over the summer again just because I like to start the school year with a freshly decluttered house (I definitely don’t have time to do deep decluttering when I’m homeschooling).

When I do this, I go pretty deep…drawers, under the bed, in the back of the closet, and so on. I manage to stay fairly on top of the shallower decluttering around the year, so the summer decluttering needs to be deep.

I make a list of all the zones in my house that I want to attend to (each bedroom, the storage closet, the linen closet, the laundry room, etc), but since each area is so different in size and scope, I’ve never specifically planned out an amount of time for each zone. Some take a day and some take a few hours.

I think it does help to tackle only one zone at a time…it seems less overwhelming to me, at least! On that note, this summer I’m planning to tackle one zone a week. That way I can keep at it without decluttering for days in a row.

I’ve started using the FlyLady system to get control over my house again when I realised something. Her system teaches you how to establish and keep habits. You have a very organised approach to every day life; you consistently post to your blog, take photographs every day, and even go grocery shopping on a set schedule. I never managed to learn this from my mom when I was growing up, and I’m only now getting them in place at the ripe old age of 37.

(This isn’t in any way meant to minimize my mom – she’s fabulous! It’s just that she did things on her own schedule and it was never the same from day to day.)

As you do these things every day do you find that your children are learning these habits from you? Are they establishing their own habits that you help them to maintain and that they’ll (hopefully) take into their adult lives?

-Kathleen

I hope they are, at least to the extent that this habit of being habitual is helpful (being TOO attached to habits and routine has its downsides!). My mom is a pretty routine/habit oriented person, and so my childhood life was mostly predictable. I think that’s at least part of why I tend to be so routine, though of course, some of that is just my personality (my sister grew up in the same household as me and she tends to be much more spontaneous).

Joshua, who tends to have a not so routine approach to life, is hopefully picking up some sense of habit that will stick with him (I have him make his bed every morning, clean his room every day, practice the piano every day, & take a picture every day, among other things).

Lisey, on the other hand, tends to naturally be quite routine oriented, so I probably will be able to take little credit if she turns out to be as steady and reliable as I imagine.

As any of my real-life friends can tell you, I always say that there are upsides and downsides to each personality type.

I’m very good at getting things done and being steady and predictable, but on the other hand, I have to really work to have a cheerful attitude when Mr. FG suggests that we do something spontaneous (“You want to go out for ice cream tonight?? You should have told me 3 days ago so I could plan for it!”)*.

*this may be a slight exaggeration

I also have to remind myself of the importance of park/pool type outings because my natural tendency is to stay home and get things done.

So, I can learn from those of you who are naturally fun and spontaneous, and you fun, spontaneous people can learn from me. And hopefully, by the grace of God, I will manage to teach my children to find a balance between spontaneity and habit.

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As sometimes happens, most of these questions are about what I do, so it’s not as easy to open up the floor to everyone else. But I am curious to hear your thoughts about routine/habit vs. fun/spontaneity, and I’m sure my readers would benefit from your whole-house decluttering ideas!