Speed Cleaning

I am not the kind of person who enjoys most cleaning jobs.  I enjoy having a clean house, but the process to get there is so...undesirable.  I would rather be sleeping, reading, playing with my kids, going for a walk, sewing, crocheting, getting a cavity filled, getting a paper cut, getting a flu shot, or almost anything, rather than cleaning.  When our family does a deep clean it is tedious and I have a hard time continuing on.  My husband can spend over 2 hours vacuuming every surface (only when we do deep cleans) but my attention vanished much too quickly.  So in order to keep our home from falling into complete and disgusting disarray, I do my own version of speed cleaning.  I don't do the whole house, but I'll say something to myself like,
"Before dinner I am going to fold and put away all the clean laundry on the couch." 
I do this every day so there isn't usually too much on the couch. 
I will also tell myself something like,
"While the kids pick their bedtime story, I'll load the dishwasher (and add detergent and start it) real quick."
Or after I get the kids cleaned up after breakfast and they run off to release their wiggles, "I'll run a load of laundry real quick."
Or when the kids are in bed, before I sit down to watch a movie with my hubby or read or whatever, "I'll wipe the counters down and sweep the floor real quick."

Notice that these seem to end in the words "real quick."  That's because I can one or two fast and easy chores before moving on to something more enjoyable, but taking the time out and saying "Now I will clean the entire house." makes me want to lay down and take a nap. 

If the walls are getting yucky, I start doing something that has to done by an adult (at least while our kids are this young), like clean the toilet, but I'll do it whole the kids are bored and tell them they cannot watch TV.  So they want to help.  I'll dive them the damp, maybe slightly soapy rags and instruct them to clean walls and doorknobs.  my daughter is so eager to please everyone around her so she'll ask me if she did a good job.  I'll tell her yes, then I might say "But you just missed one little spot right there, remember to scrub really hard!"  My son often decides the floors need to be scrubbed and then the doorknobs, so this is a work in progress, but I figure it decreases overall house dirt, so we're moving in the right direction!

Or course, visiting in-laws always get our whole family into speed cleaning mode.  They live four hours away, but usually we only have a 30 minute warning before they come over.  They stay in a hotel, so we don't have to make sleeping preparations at all, but the living room, dining area, kitchen, hall bathroom and kids room all need to be neat and tidy (that's every room in our home except my husbands and my room and our bathroom!  So we have learned the art of slow clutter in our room, load the dishwasher really fast, so a quick wipe down or viable surfaces, including the table, stove top, and counter tops, sweep, floor wipe down (don't know that I would call it "mopping"), and quick vacuum.  Then toilet, mirror and sink wipe down, and make sure there's toilet paper.  Usually that does the trick.  

This is how I get past the mental blocks and distraction to keep our home from falling apart.

I Might Have A New Favorite Laundry Stain Remover!

First, a story:
A few weeks ago, my husband was taking a nice Sunday afternoon nap.  I was awake with the kids (I took my nap while they were sleeping) and at some point I had gone into our room and forgot to close the door all the way.  Right around this time, my one year old had found some crayons his siblings had left out.  I saw him carrying around an orange crayon and was watching carefully to make sure he didn't color on anything.  He found his way into my husbands and my room to find one of his favorite people in the whole world, his daddy!  Poor baby discovered that daddy was really boring right then, since he wouldn't wake up, so my son decided that daddy must be bored and want to color, so he threw the orange crayon at daddy and ran away to play.  My hubby didn't notice this, and I'd seen the baby throw the crayon, but as with all babies his aim is always off and I thought the crayon hit the floor.  Or maybe it did but he picked it up and tried again shortly thereafter.  Anyhoo, it was a bit warm and my hubby moves a lot in his sleep.  Eventually the air conditioner kicked in and he pulled blankets over himself.  When he woke up he slip out of bed, that night, he slid into bed in the dark, and the crayon remained on his side of the bed, being squished and ground into the blue sheets every time he slept.  This went on for several days until one morning he was getting ready for work and looked over at the bed and the blanket he had tossed out of his way a few minutes prior.  He started laughing very hard and took the now small crayon off our bed.  He told me what happened and added "I don't know how we're gunna get that out, we probably won't.  Oh well, orange and blue sheets!"  When I saw the large area of crayon marks on the sheet, I immediately decided to ignore it until I felt like dealing with it.
We take showers right before bed so we usually change our sheets every other week instead of every week.  Well, today I went to change the sheets and had to figure out what to do with that stain.  I didn't have much hope.  Then.....I remembered something.  Yes, it's quite and accomplishment for me.  About a week or so ago I was researching how to make your own homemade laundry detergent and decided to give it a whirl.  After getting the ingredients I proceeded to procrastinate actually making the detergent, but I had read up on the ingredients and one of them is Fels Naptha laundry soap.

 
The packaging claimed that it was great at removing stains, and I remember hearing something about some laundry soap getting rid of some stains.  So I figured I had nothing to loose.  I got the stain part wet and rubbed the bar into the sheet.  I didn't go too crazy with it, just rubbed it in and then briefly rubbed the sheet against itself to grind it in a little, still just hoping it would make a little difference.  Guess what?  After the wash, I couldn't even FIND the spot where the stain had been.  I though I was going crazy to I put the sheet on the bed to get a god look at the whole thing, still, there was no indication that out sheet had been crayoned at all!  It's also really cheap too, like 97 cents, and doesn't wear away quickly at all.  I've seen such a huge inprovement over when we used the spray and wash stuff.

I love it when things work like they claim they do!