In order to be TRULY a lazy housewife, you have to get your house to the point that… well you know, -like that Rice Krispies treats commercial -where the woman pretends she’s working hard and she’s really reading and lounging.

What the commercial doesn’t show is the setup. Set-up is essential to household peace but you can’t go from chaos to peace overnite, especially if you’re living in squalor. But you can achieve it ‘bird by bird’ as famous author, Ann

Lamott would say. 

“E.L. Doctorow said once said that ‘Writing a novel is like driving a car at night. You can see only as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.’ You don’t have to see where you’re going, you don’t have to see your destination or everything you will pass along the way. You just have to see two or three feet ahead of you. This is right up there with the best advice on writing, or life, I have ever heard.”
— Anne Lamott (Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life)

 You just have to clear one spot at a time.

In the beginning you might have to work five advancement days a week but not hour to hour. That would make you give up right away. You wouldn’t be able to see the forest for the trees, or as in this case you won’t be able to find your socks in the huge pile of mixed up clean and dirty and donated laundry.

So you work a couple hours, take an hour or even two to gel in front of the computer or television, whichever is your bag, then work some more. The gel time is the reward for the work time. Slowly you progress. You can find socks every day now and all the children have been trained to put their shoes on the front porch. So you move to M-W-F work weeks.

Eventually, with your steady plodding you get to Tu-Th Weeks! Yes, literally a two day work week.

The bad news is you HAVE to really work on advancement days and you have to maintain on the maintenance days or you will go back to squalor.. The good news is that nobody and I mean nobody, even dear hubby, really has to know you’re not slaving away to keep your home cozy only TWO days a week.

The rest of the time you’re breezing through little routines that have become habits that are as easy as driving on automatic pilot. Every body has done that that drives. You know what I mean, when you start home from work and get to thinking about the to-do list or your friend who wants to go to lunch tomorrow or you’re listening to that new Joyce Meyer partner tape and getting a real revelation. The next thing you know, you’re pulling in your driveway and hanging up the keys.

You don’t know how you got there but you got there smoothly. It was no work at all. And home-making can be that way once the set-up is done.

Set-up means everything has to have a place, even the children’s routines. They have to know what is expected. I even explain the two day advancement theory to them. Real life examples come in handy.

I sat at the computer the other day almost the entire day. The children were uncooperative and I wanted to write anyway. Dear hubby called and said hello, dear. on my way home. need some milk? etc? yes, dear, thanks so much. mmwah [kiss] see ya in a minit. Get up, yell, let’s clean up -Daddy’s on his way. Got the visual area clean really fast with every body hopping.

Dad comes in and says, wow ya’ll worked hard all day. I smile. the kids go play.

Next day, advancement day: do you remember yesterday? when dad thought we worked soooo hard?…