Posted on

Housekeeping – FAIL of all FAILS.

When I saw that the Parent Bloggers Network was having a Blog Blast sweepstakes on the subject of housecleaning, I had a nice little chuckle at my own expense. Seriously, this is one of my terrible life failures. I am messy. I have never kept a clean bedroom. My husband calls my car “the rolling trash bin” because it is always full of stuff. And I hate, hate, HATE housecleaning. I am 31 years old (shut up Emily), can I really change NOW??

I like to keep a clean house – I just don’t like to be the one who keeps it that way! I don’t really have any cleaning methods or a cleaning routine. I do the dishes when we don’t have any more utensils, do the laundry when no one has clothes to wear, and sweep the floors when cat hair dust bunnies start flying through the air. Or, when I have company coming over. Then, and only then, I panic and clean like a banshee!!

I am not exactly the world’s best housewife!

It’s not that I’m lazy – I swear. I just HATE cleaning. Hate hate hate it. I am definitely lacking in the motivation department.

Just so I can lay my shame wide open for you all, please enjoy the current state of my dining room table:

what?? like YOUR house isn't this messy?

What?? Don’t judge me!

The person in my house who is actually good at cleaning is my hubby. He is very meticulous. Too bad he works 55 hours a week so I can live a life of leisure and doesn’t have time to do all the housework too! Seriously, though, he really helps me out a lot, especially with the dishes and the laundry on weekends. And when we have a birthday party or company to clean for, we always clean together, and that make it more fun! One of the cleaning products that we use when we clean is Pledge Multi-Surface, and I have to give my hubby credit for discovering it! He started out using it for his electronics, and then we started using it everywhere in the house. It works great on all surfaces.

To help those who need a little cleaning intervention, Pledge Multi-Surface has a new site coming in May! Go there now to download a $2 off coupon (did someone say COUPON? Holla!), and when the site launches in May, you’ll get to see five bloggers (not me, oh how I wish!) get a cleaning intervention!

In the meantime, if any of you want to get together and do a cleaning intervention on ME, my door is always open. When there isn’t a huge pile of hot wheels and train track blocking the entry way, that is.

Post to Twitter

Posted on

FREE Will & Trust Kit from Suze Orman!

Today Emily and I, along with some other bloggers, got to chat with the DYNAMIC and passionate Suze Orman on the phone, thanks to Avon. Suze is the financial advisor to all of Avon’s independent consultants. Isn’t that cool? She’ll also be featured in Avon’s “Success Without Limits” program, airing on Oxygen at 6:30 PM this Saturday. Suze’s personality was as large over the phone as it is on her financial television show. She was very funny and straight forward and she gave us some great financial advice.

Here are three key things I learned from our call with Suze today:

1) Your emergency fund should contain enough money for you to live off of for eight months! I didn’t realize this, I was thinking more four to six months! Very eye-opening.

2) Going back to school? Don’t defer your previous student loans! Just keep paying them off. Student loans can almost never be discharged in a bankruptcy filing should you fall on hard times, so get them out of the way NOW.

3) You should never start saving for your kid’s college funds until you are out of credit card debt, have a fully-funded emergency fund, and are putting savings away for your own retirement. Once you have those things in place, Suze recommends a 529 college savings plan.

For more great financial tips, you can visit Suze’s website – and Suze was kind enough to give all of us and our readers a FREE GIFT! From now until Midnight on Saturday, April 25th, you can download Suze’s Will & Trust Kit – valued at $2,500 – for FREE!! Here’s how:

Just go to suzeorman.com and click the “Will & Trust Kit” link in the blue bar on the left-hand side of the home page. Click the orange “Gift Code” button and enter “Moms Rule” into the gift code field. Click the green “Submit” button and follow the instructions to redeem your free copy of the Will & Trust Kit.

I did this tonight and finished the whole kit in less than two hours – that’s with my kids running around everywhere and my phone ringing off the hook! It is an awesome resource. You do it all online and then it prints to PDF for you. Amazing! Thanks Suze, for the great call today and the great gift.

Post to Twitter

Posted on

Wasssupdate!

So, I kind of left you hanging there a couple of weeks ago when I told you my hormones still had me all in a twist and that I was going to the doctor.

I thought I’d better give you an update so that you’d know I haven’t done anything crazy like laying down in oncoming traffic or running around the neighborhood in my underwear searching for my childhood cat who died when I was 10. *Ahem*.

My OB-GYN agreed with my self-diagnosis of a hormone imbalance (me + Google = medical degree!) and she said the best thing for that really would be for me to try another kind of birth control pill. Now, since the pill is part of what made me go crazy in the first place, I was reluctant to try it unless I had a little something to take the edge off the debilitating depression it *just might* cause.

So, it’s Ortho-Tri-Cyclen with a side of low-dose Prozac. (Is that like Diet Prozac? Prozac Lite?) I already started the happy pills, but I can’t start the birth control until Sunday, for reasons I should not have to explain to any of you females reading this. I am a little nervous about this week as it gets closer to the beginning of my cycle, which is when I generally get irrational and weepy and what-not! I’ll be fun two weeks of the month, and then the complete opposite of fine the other two. So here’s hoping the superhappyfun meds are already kicked in enough. We shall see. In any case, I am hopeful that a month from now, I will be feeling MUCH better. And my doc had me schedule an appointment with her in a couple of weeks to see how I’m doing.

I appreciate all your comments, thoughts, and prayers! I am a million kinds of tired of not feeling like myself, and a million kinds of thankful that you’ve let me share my feelings with you.

{Insert supportive comments here.}

Love y’all.

Post to Twitter