Sounds like the Flylady morning routine is what you are already doing especially if you are cleaning your sink the night before. I think Flylady would suggest you make the bed but heck, we all will understand if you decide you don't have the time. Have you tried requesting the emails in "digest format"? Most yahoo groups allow this. That means all the messages in one day are collected together and sent out as one message. That said, I just sort my inbox alphabetically by the sender and delete all the messages I don't want from flylady. Kind of feels cleansing and usually doesn't take too much time. Of course I'm recently retired so I know there is no comparison in stress levels with someone who works outside the home. I have just started Flylady and am going very slowly. She herself says that it all started with a commitment on her part to keep her sink clean so it was clean when she woke up at least for 30 days. I've kind of started that way and progressed to some additions. But I'm taking it very slowly. I LOVE the testimonials she sends out. I delete almost everything else but always read testimonials. I don't have children but even the ones about kids are inspiring. Housework can be so BORING. I had a career as an engineer before I retired and I'm having trouble coming down to real life and trying to have consistently an organized fairly clean house (that is in the middle of being remodeled because we were conned by a contractor but another story..). The testimonials and sometimes some of the messages (depending on where I'm at) really keep me from feeling I'm in a dungeon with horrible boring tasks and no one that understands. Anyway, I figure at the rate I'm going that my house may look pretty decent in about a year or so. Just do what she says, don't worry about being behind, just jump in where you're at. Maybe we could have a thread on this Cleaning Board for flylady support? I'd like that. You made a good start. Once it reaches 99 posts (I think that's max number), we can start "volume 2" like they do on some of the other forums. Of course with your work schedule, you may not have time. If you don't want to, I don't mind starting a thread. Let me know if you are interested and also share any of the other "challenges" that you have in particular that are driving you crazy. One last important thing. If we do this, we have to be concerned about Flylady copyrights and we can't cut and paste anything from her site (or from her emails). Hopefully, just share our problems with our clutter. I think we should still be able to use some of her terms such as 27 Fling boogie where you run thru the house as quickly as possible finding 27 things to throw away. I have modified it to be used with a timer and usually set it for 15 minutes or 30 minutes. Does wonderful things. I usually have to force myself to quit decluttering when the timer goes off. Maybe a Flylady thread would make more sense in the "Organizing Home" forum? What do you think? --Alice

I "crockpot cooked" this past weekend. I'm still recuperating from this past winter's gas bills :) Anyway, I used the cooking bags in the crockpot (I have 2) and was able to cook a few items at the same time. Heres what I did: In one crockpot, I place a seasoned pork roast with veggies in a cooking bag. I put it on the bottom. Then I used a smaller cooking bag and put in whole green beans with sliced green, red, and yellow peppers. In a second crock pot, I cooked chorizo(sp?) sausages with peppers. Put all this stuff on and went to church. When I came home, the aroma was mouth watering! Here's what the family is eating this week (I eat what they eat, minus starches and sweets) Sunday Dinner Pork roast with veggies, rice, and garlic bread Monday Chorizo sausages (drained fat), pasta, green salad Tuesday BBQ pork sandwiches, coleslaw (I use preshredded coleslaw mix) Wednesday Upside Down Night (waffles, scrambled eggs, bacon) Thursday Sausage subs (last of the chorizo), oven baked french fries Friday Its anybody's guess.......

I'm a very big menu planner. I'm a WOHM to 3 boys with 136 acre ranch with 12 horses to keep up with. 40+ hours of volunteering a week, every week, minimum. I literally plan everything. I plan for a month at a time and try to buy for as much of that at a time as I can, usually I can afford about 3 weeks of it, sometimes more. I shop every two weeks. We're in the boonies and I don't like to drive an hour to the major stores. I try to plan for one new recipe every week and at least one crock pot recipe every week, sometimes two. Love the Slow Cooker bags. My biggest goal is to stay below our grocery budget. I don't necessarily cook for the month, but do things to help me out for the month. I'll buy the family pack of ground beef and cook the whole thing. Then strain it, cool in and freeze it 2 cups at a time (about 1 lb) in freezer bags for taco's, sloppy joes, or cowboy beans. I'll slice my round steaks for my stroganoff and other dishes. I cook my italian sausage, slice it and store it in freezer bags in the right amount for my red beans and rice and spaghetti sauce. The amount of time it saves me is incredible. When you come in the door from work and have laundry and a house to clean, 4 hours of homework, dogs and horses to feed and still have dinner to cook it's nice to know you can throw a bag of precooked ground beef in the micro for 1 1/2 min , grate some cheese, chop tomatoes, onions, lettuce and cook some shells and you have homemade taco's. In less than 15 min. When I cut veggies for my roast (crockpot)I just keep on cutting. I set up 5 bags and 1 container. The container is for the morning and the bags go in the freezer. It only takes a couple extra mins to chop those veggies and saves a ton of time when running out the door in the morning. The kids also like knowing that they can look at the menu on the fridge in the morning and know what's for dinner that night or the rest of the week. Something to look forward to if their favorite food is coming up.

Thanks for all the great feedback and warm welcomes, everyone! I'm really excited to hear from other large families, too, because you guys get how important function is (not that the rest of you don't, but we are definitely in a different category than families with 2.1 children!) ;o) Regarding the refrigeration questions, I forgot to mention this in my OP, but we are keeping our current refrigerator (a 5 year old wide-by-side - 27 cubic feet) and will be getting a deep freeze. They'll be kept in the basement in a secondary kitchen/laundry area. It won't be the most convenient, but especially at times like holidays, I'll have the space I need for everything. We're also considering an under-cabinet fridge which would just be for milk. I'd love refrigerator drawers, but I don't think I can carve any more out of our budget. I've gotten really good at weekly menu planning and I basically buy just whatever we need for that week's meals, but I always have to make mid-week milk runs. Our big new pantry and the spare refrigeration will mostly be there to help me take advantage of good deals and buy loads of milk! Plus, we have a large storage room in our basement that's entirely devoted to food storage. acountryfarm - I would LOVE to see pictures of your kitchen! Do you have them posted somewhere? rhome410 - thanks for offering to help with the 3Ds. I would be happy to pay you something for your time. We live in a very rural area, and the nearest kitchen designers are 2 hours from here. We could have gone to the local building center, but didn't feel good about having them do all the work when we weren't buying our cabinets from them. I will email you what I have. rmkitchen - we were looking at your kitchen the other night, and I guess I should confess I'm totally stealing your Roomba garage idea. ;o) That's just too cool! Your kitchen is beautiful. And cosmo_nj - one day at a time! :oD The funny thing is, I used to say I didn't want kids. It was a HUGE deal for us to decide to have a third child, and we always say that it was the fact that #3 turned out to be twins that led us down this road. After they were born, we adopted 8 more amazing children. :o) It's wild, but lots of fun!