Need help flying? Try cockroaches?

I'm sure most of my readers are familiar with Flylady.  When we were first juggling parenthood with Mark's job and my grad school, I turned there to figure out how we were going to find time to keep the apartment tidy and livable.  I learned a lot:  to prioritize tasks, to shine the sink first, and to build routines.   At one point I even put together the "Control Journal" she suggests, with tasks carefully divided into zones and doled out daily, weekly, monthly, or yearly.    Our family grew, I finished school, I started homeschooling, and the Control Journal -- as important as it had been while I was learning -- became too detailed and inflexible.  I backed off and found my own balance, kept what worked and tossed what didn't.  I still roll my eyes when I remember trying to clean all the light fixtures every month.

But there was one Flylady habit that had never worked and yet that I still tried again and again to develop:  the so-called evening routine.   Specifically, the just-before-bed cleanup and prep, so that the house would be comfortable and everything would be ready to go first thing in the morning.    Every evening that Mark and I managed to do it, the next day went more smoothly and peacefully.  It was as close to a panacea as I have ever discovered in my home life.  And yet, we would still more often than not go to bed tired, with smears on the floor and clutter on the rug and dishes in the sink and the diaper bag empty (or worse yet, full of wet diapers).  It wasn't  that we didn't know better, it was just hard to get ourselves moving.

Then one day something... most likely, I'm told, a cardboard-packaged food item from the grocery store... entered our house with a few stowaway Blatella germanica eggs.  A few weeks later we were infested with cockroaches.  Ugh.  They nested inside the door of the dishwasher.  I was horrified; my Texas-born friend Hannah reassured me that cockroach infestation can happen to the best of people, and is not necessarily a sign of moral decrepitude.  So we bought roach traps and sealed all our food up in jars... and cleaned.  The roach traps helped a little bit, but we discovered after a week out of town that if all the food is removed from the kitchen it gets rid of the roaches better than any trap.  So we started being excruciatingly careful to wipe down the counters and the sink, to remove every crumb, to take out the trash, before going to bed at night.  For about three months we mopped the floor every night.

And the cockroaches went away.  Mostly.

And after a while, we realized that the cockroaches had accomplished something that we couldn't do on our own:  Motivate ourselves to develop the evening-cleanup habit.  Talk about a blessing in disguise.

I said the cockroaches went away "mostly."  There are still some living somewhere in the house.  Not very many, I don't think.  But enough.  Just exactly enough.  Because we don't see them -- unless we start slacking off on the evening cleanup.  Then we might see a little one in the sink when we come down in the morning, or darting for cover under the stove.

Keeps us on our toes.  And keeps us wiping those counters down, just for five minutes before we go to bed.

Comments

[MrsDarwin]

Nothing motivates one to action like a huge cockroach running (or flying) around the room.

We found that the same cleaning routines will help stem invasions of ants as well.

[CJ]

Oh, I thought this was going to be some hip new take on FlyLady -- no purple puddles, no repetitious testimonials, just tough moms (with tattoos, perhaps) with no time for nonsense. I wasn't expecting actual cockroaches! Good luck with the final eradication.