Me and YOU Weekly is back :)

I just love Karlee's...  I won't say indecisiveness, cause that's not what it is.....  let's call it....experimental nature, to play around with the format of Me and YOU over at The Mother Experiment!  She tried monthly for a bit to see how it would go and she decided that she likes weekly better.  I do to...  I'm the kind of person that will take my eye of the prize if given too long to achieve it, so going back to weekly will hopefully help me to get to a few 'priority' type things.  The other regular participant, Rhianna at A Parenting Life is happy with it going back to weekly too.  Between the three of us, we've had some great success in getting some of those little niggly things done or changed or just simply thought about and are all pretty happy with our successes.

My monthly goal is to give the girls a great Christmas month and we've done pretty well, despite missing out on the Playgroup Christmas party, which would have been awesome fun for Mackenna.  I just forget to RSVP to the invitation and then it got too late and we missed out.  We did go to Todd's work Christmas Party which was held at Gecko's Play Centre and was a huge family event with a visit from Santa and lots of festivities and she had a ball at that.  We've also been talking lots about Christmas and going past Santa to check out his caper (she completely freaked out last year at Santa....  was not keen to go anywhere near him without a firm grasp around my neck!  I can understand though, she wasn't even 1 at the time and he was big, fluffy and bright red and she couldn't properly see his face under all the white furry beard.... to be honest, I was kinda freaked out too! ;o) )  I'm also keen to catch up with lots of very dear friends that I haven't seen in ages (like too-many-years ages,) so hopefully I can get to organising all of those too.

Now to my plans for this week.  I've been trying to decide between a few different things....  everything I come up with is just a little thing that I'd really like to do more of, but I have so many that have the same priority in the grand scheme of things that I'm having trouble deciding.  I'm very, very proud to say that I appear to have conquered my mountain of washing... for now..... and at this present point in time, I can go into my laundry and find 4 empty laundry baskets.  Normally they are full of clean washing waiting to be folded, or random things waiting to be washed.  I do have washing to do, but if I can do a load or 2 a day and fold it before bed, which is honestly such an easy thing to do, I'll have it completely conquered and be at a 'normal' level of regular 'maintenance' washing rather than a lazy 'Too Hard' pile!  It's great.  (Rhianna at A Parenting Life has the same struggles as me with her housework.....  I love her references to Mt Washmore.....  have to silently giggle to myself when I'm doing washing thinking about it (yes, I'm strange....  but for some reason it keeps me focused to get it done!)  Thanks for that inspiration Rhianna!! ;o) )

So I'm going to lay out a few things that I'd like to get done, all of which really need to get done THIS week.  They are small things, easy to achieve if I just dedicate some time and effort to them:

1.     I want to rinse the girls bottles immediately after they are finished. Sounds simple enough right, but I always get distracted with burps or cuddles or nappy changes or Mackenna and they end up sitting on the sink with leftover milk going gross and sticking to the bottle and the teats going slimy until the end of the day when I wash them up....  yuck!  It's lazy and messy and creates so much extra work in the long run.  It makes it so much easier to wash them all up properly at the end of the night, if I don't have to rinse and scrub them all first!  It wasn't so bad when Piper was breastfed and only having one bottle a day and Mackenna two.  Now Mackenna only has one but Piper is weaned and has at least 4, sometimes 5 bottles a day.  When you add all their plastic bowls, plates and cutlery and Mackenna's 3 or 4 plastic sippy cups a day, my washing up pile at the end of the day is enormous (I don't like putting their plastic stuff in the dishwasher) so simple things I can do during the day will make it so much quicker and easier!  
2.     At least 3 blogs posts.....  I've been concentrating so much on my housework lately (I've been busy with stuff other than my washing...it wasn't that bad that all my free time was focused on that, but I don't need to bore you with every single chore I got through!) that I've been neglecting the blog.  I've also spent the time I could be blogging myself checking out a few other blogs I've found that I like, so my free time has been going into that.  I'm keen to find a balance between them all during the small windows of free time I have.
3.     Get through all my paperwork and 'admin'-ey type tasks.  Heaps to get through....  lots of little niggly bits of paper to sign and send, bill payments to set up, emails to send and calls to make.  Doing a lot of these jobs often bores or depresses me though, so I become Queen Procrastination and put them off until it's too late or a big job so if I just again spend some time and effort now, it won't be so bad later in the week and as we get closer to Christmas and the end of the month, when all the bills are due.  (Wouldn't it be nice if one day we all got letters in the mail from all the utilities/insurance/credit card companies that said "You know what.....  don't worry about your bill this month, it's on us! Buy your kids an extra toy or something and have a Merry Christmas!" .........  Hahahahahahahahahahaha!! Not sure I'll be holding my breath waiting for that day to arrive :P  )
4.     This is probably the most important one.....  to get to bed each night before 11pm.  11:30 at the absolute latest.  I'm a chronic nightowl and normally crawl into bed after midnight, even though I know that Piper will be up sometime between 5 and 6am.   Channel 10 aren't helping my plight at the moment by having the latest season of Go Girls on at 10:30pm (hilarious Kiwi show...  I can't get enough of it!) I have it Series linked on the Foxtel box, so I have no real reason that I can't just watch it the next day, but they've only got 4 episodes left until the end of the season and I like to watch things when they're on rather than later (not really sure why.....  just one of those stupid things I like to do... like watching a movie on Free to Air Standard Def TV, ads and all when the High Def Bluray is in the rack!) so I always end up staying up to watch it.  Piper sleeps through now so my sleep deprivation problems these days are only my own...  I can't pass the blame on to anybody else. (Not that I ever 'blamed' Piper...  she can't help it that she was hungry!)

So wish me luck once again for another week and stayed tuned for how I go next week!!  Don't forget to check out The Mother Experiment and My Parenting Life for what Karlee and Rhianna are up to this week and wish them some luck too!!  (We might even get a few others link up too...  every now and again other bloggers jump on board!)