Ahhhhhhhhh (that's the sound of angelic voices)

Did you hear it? That unmistakable sound of angelic voices? I sure did. Here's why.

(first, a little background story) I was reading one of my favorite blogs, when she mentioned this Fly lady thing and shining her sink. I thought what's that, so, like any curious person would do, I clicked on the link. I was inspired. I love the concepts on there! If you don't know what it is, or you haven't clicked on the link above, let me just tell you that Fly lady is about making routines, cleaning, and taking back your life, without feeling overwhelmed. She has set out steps to insure you get a lot accomplished in a short time. There's even a section for kids!

(now for the story)Fly lady mentioned calling all the family into the room and giving them a brief here's what we're gonna do- type- thing where you clean like mad for 15 minutes. So, I thought I'd give it a try. What's the worst that could happen?

I told my girls "We're going to set the timer and clean the house as fast as we can for 15 minutes. We're going to clean up and pick up everything even if it's not our mess. And we're only going to do it for 15 minutes!" I was so pumped! I wanted them to be as excited as I was. But, they looked at me like I had just signed them up for a colonoscopy! Yes, they were that excited! But I kept my chin up, kept saying "isn't this going to be fun?!" I put on some good cleaning tunes, "Supe" set the timer, and away we went! (now here's where the story gets good) All of us were literally running from project to project, cleaning like our pants were on fire. "Supe" would holler out "8 minutes left!" Then, "5 minutes!" When we got down to just two minutes, we were really cookin'! And guess what? We got it done! The whole house (minus bedrooms). "Supe" didn't want to stop. She said "I just want to dust one more thing!" Did you just read what I said? She did not want to stop cleaning! When does that happen? And then I had sort of a Mary Poppins moment. It was practically perfect in every way!

I figured we were on a roll, so we would continue on. So I said "Now we're going to clean our rooms for 15 minutes. Vacuuming and everything. But once the timer goes off, you have to be done with your room. You can't continue cleaning it after the timer goes off." So, we all cleaned up our rooms in the same manner as we did the house. I had the girls throw their clothes down the steps and told them we would take care of it when we were done. We continued counting down the minutes until we were finished. The rooms looked great! Yahoo!

And our last task (because we now had a ton of laundry littering the steps) was to sort the laundry. We set the timer again, and sorted like our life depended on it, for 10 minutes, and whatta' you know? Another success! So, there we were. We'd been cleaning for 40 minutes and we had the house cleaned (including dusting and vacuuming), the bedrooms were all cleaned, and we had the laundry out of our rooms, sorted, and even had a load in the washer! Whew! And then it happened....the angelic voices I was talking about.... I heard them. I almost teared up!

When we finished, we turned off all the lights, grabbed our stuff, locked the doors, and left the house for some fun!!

Note: yesterday, we did the same thing, only this time, Jason was home, so there were 4 of us to clean! In just 45 minutes, we got all of our rooms cleaned, the toilets and sinks scrubbed, the floors vacuumed, and swept, and all the laundry folded and put away!

p.s. Then Jason heard the voices too!

One of the songs that inspired us was Supermassive Black Whole by Muse, so it's only appropriate that it be the song today!