Hour-a-Day April: Day Twenty-Five

I decided to break my "Mondays are my day off" rule today because Nana had the day off of school, so I had a daytime sitter for the girls. Dorothy woke up too early, but then we went back to sleep until 9, which was nice. Then Valerie slept until 10. Poor kid is just plum worn out from a busy busy weekend.

Once we finally got moving, I took the girls over to Nana's, nursed Dorothy, then left, figuring I had about 3 hours before she would need to nurse again. I stopped by my pastor's house to pick up something I had forgotten at church, then visited for a bit, because it was so nice out, and I was dreading going indoors to clean. Then I checked my email. Then I made some lunch. And, all in all, I did a pretty good job of wasting the first hour and a half of my kid-free cleaning time.

But I finally found the motivation to get off my butt, put on my Justin Timberlake Pandora station, and started cleaning.

One flaw I have noticed in my HADA challenge is that it doesn't encourage me to do the everyday stuff that also needs to get done. If I have ten minutes to spare, why should I spend it doing dishes, which doesn't count? So I've been working on my projects and neglecting too many of the daily tasks. So today, I added a new rule to HADA, because it's my challenge that I made up and I get to make up new rules on Day 25 if I want to.

• Daily upkeep tasks count for HADA, but they can't make up more than 30 minutes of the base hour. So, I can spend 30 minutes on upkeep and 30 minutes on projects, or 2 hours on upkeep and 30 minutes on projects, or an hour on projects and no time on upkeep, but I can't just spend an hour on upkeep. Unless it's the first day that this new rule goes into effect, in which case, I can spend all of my HADA time on upkeep, for that day, and that day only.

So, long story short, I spent the next two hours working on things that I wouldn't have counted for HADA before today, but that seriously needed to be done. Dishes, laundry, putting away clothes, emptying trash. It's not glamorous, and I'm still not caught up, but it needed to be done, and, frankly, I probably could have counted it for HADA even without the rule amendment, because I've been having a hard time finding the time and energy for the surface stuff lately.

DAy 25 tally: 2 hours doing stuff that wouldn't have counted yesterday, but really needed to be done.

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