Finding my place as a "homemaker"

I almost hate to blog about this ~ like I'm going to jinx myself and everything is going to fall apart. :)

When we moved into our house in April, I swore to myself that I was going to keep on top of all the housekeeping stuff. I promptly made a list of "house chores" and how many times a week they needed to be done that I kept on my computer and would mark off as they got done though out the week.

I don't think I ever had a "success" week where I finished all the chores (at least not as many times as I thought was the ideal amount), so my list kind of started gathering dust. As did a lot of the furniture in the house. lol

A few weeks ago a friend of mine was telling me about this schedule she got from the Motivated Moms website. Basically its a schedule designed by some stay at home moms that break down household chores into "tasks" that are supposed to take 2-5 minutes to help moms from getting overwhelmed by the thought of keeping up with everything in their household. After looking over the schedule I realized that it didn't really apply that well to *my* life as there were things that were left off and things that I didn't care about so much, so I decided to drag out my old household chores list and try to set up a weekly schedule for myself with chores that needed to be completed each day. My goal was to just have 3 or 4 things to do each day. I'm only on day 2, but its working really, really well for me. One of my chores for each day is to make the beds ~ something really simple, but something that I had a hard time doing in the past. I've also made it a point to set my alarm and get up, showered/dressed, and check my e-mail before Alyssa wakes up (unfortunately Alyssa has been waking up early, too, so I haven't been totally successful with this one, but I have noticed that waking up to an alarm instead of a child is making me a lot more patient throughout the day). I'm absolutely loving that I'm able to stick to this schedule and get things done that I would normally say "I'll do that tomorrow, I'm going to just be lazy today" when I just had a list of things that needed to be done during the week. And I've found that its a lot easier for me to sit down and REALLY enjoy hanging out with Alyssa. Before I felt anxious and guilty for sitting down and watching Sesame Street with her or just sitting and watching her play with her dolls, but now that I have this structure to my day I know that I can get everything I need to get done done and still have time to enjoy my sweet girl.

I feel like after 2 1/2 years of being a stay at home mom/wife I'm *finally* getting the hang of this. Now let's toss a newborn into the mix and watch it fall all apart, right? :)