I KNOW it would be easy to just wash the one cup, or file the one
piece of paper, or wipe off the shower door every day after my shower, but
instead I let everything build up into a crisis.
Okay...I DO have this problem, however NOT with dishes. I normally wash my dishes every night after dinner (everything gets washed). By the time I go to bed the only thing there is, is 2 coffee cups, one spoon, and occasionally a cereal bowl if Mike eats cereal before bed. I don't wash them right away. I do them at about lunchtime. On school days I am home with the littlest one (who is tube fed) so I'm the only one dirtying dishes. So there will be two more coffee cups from the morning coffee (and a spoon). The kids normally wait to eat breakfast at school...(not big morning eaters). Will have a cup of milk tho. Mike doesn't eat breakfast normally, and if I do, I'll have a bagel, on a napkin...(LOL) so all there is dirty is a knife. So you see, we don't have a lot of dishes during the day. Lunchtime or so, I wash everything (usualy after I eat something so that gets washed). Then the kids will come home ! and have a snack (on a napkin or paper towel), and a drink. I have them trained to use the same cup from the time they get home until bed, so this one cup will be their only one. They get rinsed after use and set up on the back of the sink until needed again. Then we're back to dinner again. I wash everything again and that's that. My dishes rarely pile up unless I have something going on after dinner and I'm rushing...which usually happens during baseball or track season when I'm running to practices and games.
This system works really well for me. I find myself not hating washing dishes like I used to because they are so much easier to wash not having sat and crusted for a few days or a week. I used to be really bad about washing dishes and would go a week or more. I'll even go so far as to confess to one time letting a dirty pot sit on my stove for so long that it got so foul-smelling I was convinced there was a rotten mouse or something in my house. When my husband boldly suggested it was that "funky" pot sitting on the stove with water that had turned into some incredibly toxic level of penicillin, I got very defensive and we had a big fight.
But he was right. I had him take that funk and dump it and then I soaked the pan again and washed it up reall clean and you know ... the smell was gone. I used to stand at the sink for so long my back, legs, feet, and everything else hurt. It was my most loathed job. Now it's a perfect system (in my opinion) and I don't grow my own antibiotics anymore. (please don't check my fridge tho, there might be some in there every once in a while).
But as for letting things go until they are a monstrosity to tackle, YES, I do this regularly with things like laundry, bathtub, bathroom trash can. (can we pack it any fuller before we dump it?) I can very much relate to what you're saying. I wish I had a cure for this ailment. But I don't. Baby Steps...the concept is of starting out small, not trying to "build Rome in a day" is good, but in the long run, baby steps wear you out with lots of small small steps and little accomplishments, not much satisfaction in your journey until you've taken a LOT of baby steps. So I can agree with that problem about baby steps.
Just my 2 cents...sorry if I rambled a bit.
Beth
