31 Days to Clean

I know it's been a while, but honestly, you'd have to live the last year of my life to believe it. My husband was severely injured, and then I got off mytooshy and dropped 40 pounds and reinvented myself as a competitive figure athlete. I still blogged, but rather than here, I created a different blog, The Incredible Shrinking Mom which come to think of it, I also need to update. Silly me..lol.

I'm getting my routines back together and finding a balance in my life. I confess, I tend to go overboard in one direction or another. Balance is something I have to work hard to find. While amusing the crap out of myself by reading several public domain books on being a housewife printed between the late 1800's and the 1950's (seriously hilarious stuff, and sometimes quite sad. There was an entire chapter in one about Eugenics. Here I was thinking this stuff only happened in Germany. I guess history really is written by the victor, but I digress. While hunting up more hilarity I discovered one I actually wanted to read. It's called 31 Days to Clean-having a Martha house the Mary way.

I'll be the first to admit, I'm more of a Mary. Emotion is the name of my game, but unlike most women out there, I kinda long to be the Martha. (Interesting Observation, boy did Martha Stewart live up to her name!!) The author doesn't claim to be a born Martha, and starts off by saying this is NOT a how to clean your house book. If you want one of those, Martha Stewart wrote one about housekeeping I want but refuse to buy as it's not on Kindle.

Today is my first day and today's challenge is to write a mission statement. Well that's today's Mary challenge anyway.

"Identify specific reasons you want to make your home a haven, and then complete a mission statement based on those reasons. Write down exactly why you want a clean home. Be specific. Maybe your mission will be in the form of a paragraph, a poem or a list. Consider adding a verse or a quote that motivates you. When you are finished, it should take you no longer than a minute to read over your "mission statement". Now dress it up! make it pretty, put it in a frame, just be creative and have fun. Put it somewhere where you can see it every day."

So here is my mission statement:

"To provide my family with a healthy, safe and welcoming home, where they can both be comfortable hanging out, and feel comfortable inviting people over".

There are reasons for this. The first part is obvious. All children should have a save and healthy home. That's a given, if they don't, they need to be living somewhere else. The second part is personal as is the third. Have you ever been in an immaculate home? Perhaps a friend invited you over, or a relative? How often do you feel at ease in these homes? I don't. A friend growing up had the most beautiful home. It was always amazingly clean and fresh, and I adored being there. At the same time, I was always nervous being there. It felt almost like a museum. I was always concerned about fingerprinting a wall, tracking dirt in, breaking something. You get the idea.

This is in contrast to my own home growing up which while not filthy, was never clean enough for me to feel comfortable inviting my friends over. If they did come by, i would immediately drag them to my own bedroom. My parents both worked full time so I don't fault either one of them as it was myresponsibility to keep the house. I just never knew how.

So that's my mission statement and my Mary Challenge.

The Martha challenge involves putting together a list of all the cleaning supplies for all the Martha challenges in the book.

The Homefront Honey challenge is to blog about these challenges every day. :) If you'd like to join along, check out Amazon, as this book is in fact on the kindle. Even if you don't have a kindle, you can download the kindle software for your computer for free and read it that way.

Have a blessed day!!