Greetings! This is a happy day for me! I finally quit procrastinating and started a blog! For months now I have been thinking about sharing my journey in life dealing with my perfectionism. Perfectionism goes hand-in-hand with another P word-- procrastination! I'll bet you didn't realize that they were related, huh?! The first time I heard about perfectionism was in college. I was in my courses for elementary education. Our teachers had us take an inventory called the Enneagram. Most of us were 2 to 3 of the 9 personality types. My biggest type was the Perfectionist! I didn't think much about what that meant until years later. So I like things to be perfect-- big deal...

Now I live with it every day. In 2008 I quit my job as a banker that I'd had for 8 years. My husband and I had been married 4.5 years and had a beautiful 10 month old daughter. For most of my life I just assumed that I'd be a stay-at-home mom and raise my kids. After our daughter was born I had to return to work. Every day I would wish to be home-- "Oh, if only I could be home then everything would just fall into place." Well, when day finally came it was a lot more overwhelming than I expected. The flood of emotions, the lost sense of yourself, the agony of not knowing what to do with your time... I felt all of it. I did appreciate being home in the sense that I didn't want to be back at work and I also wanted it for my daughter. After 5 months of sort of blindly going at it I was at my wits end-- I went online and discovered The FlyLady!

I had visited her site years before but stopped using it after I read that her first step to take was to "Shine Your Sink". I thought that was nuts. What did that have to do with getting things together? So, this time I thought I'd just give it a shot-- usually the kitchen and dishes was the last thing on my mind after a hard days work. That attitude continued after quitting my job. The dishes would pile up on the counters and the sink would be full of gross water and stuck on food. FlyLady said it was perfectionism that kept me from doing those dishes. She recommended that I start with shining my sink! I mean REALLY shine it-- get out the Comet and the Ajax shine it! Then after that the goal was to KEEP it that way-- no more "mystery water" and no more piled up dishes. The perfectionism was giving me that attitude "if I don't have time to do it perfectly then I don't have time to do it at all". I'd never thought of it that way. That day was a turning point in my life.

Now it's been exactly 13 months with FlyLady and I am an official "FlyBaby". I've taken her steps with a grain of salt-- some of them haven't sunk in until now. Mostly I've come to know that my perfectionism holds me back and keeps me from peace and life. I want to share my journey and my thoughts with you. I hope you enjoy it and can even be helped by it yourself!