As we have all observed, the house does not clean itself. This is most unfortunate but with a little discipline and a plan, your home can be clean enough for it to not look like a bomb went off.
You have to assign chores to yourself every day. When the children were all little, the chores all got assigned to me. It was exhausting in those days but now I have the luxury of some wonderful helpers. I often tell my oldest two daughters, "Y'all are so hard-working, I feel like there's three of me."
Personally I don't mind laundry at all. Maybe it's because I like clothes. The shopper deep down has a positive side after all. I am actually a little bit of a laundry control freak because some stuff can't go in the dryer or it shrinks, and you just can't trust people to not throw in a bright red towel with my brand new white jeans. My basic routine is to throw in one load of laundry morning. If you do that, laundry is just no big deal. If you let it pile up instead, like anything you will feel hopeless about it. Seriously we can't complain that much about laundry. It's not like we're hand washing much of anything like the Little House on the Prairie people. And unless your husband has work clothes that have to be ironed, the world is so casual these days that I rarely iron.
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You have to assign chores to yourself every day. When the children were all little, the chores all got assigned to me. It was exhausting in those days but now I have the luxury of some wonderful helpers. I often tell my oldest two daughters, "Y'all are so hard-working, I feel like there's three of me."
Personally I don't mind laundry at all. Maybe it's because I like clothes. The shopper deep down has a positive side after all. I am actually a little bit of a laundry control freak because some stuff can't go in the dryer or it shrinks, and you just can't trust people to not throw in a bright red towel with my brand new white jeans. My basic routine is to throw in one load of laundry morning. If you do that, laundry is just no big deal. If you let it pile up instead, like anything you will feel hopeless about it. Seriously we can't complain that much about laundry. It's not like we're hand washing much of anything like the Little House on the Prairie people. And unless your husband has work clothes that have to be ironed, the world is so casual these days that I rarely iron.
Please click below to read more.
Chores (continued)
| I'm okay with that. I am proud to be an ironing underachiever. I am secure in my ironing disability. Anyway, every morning, I decide if I'm doing darks or lights that day, throw 'er in the washing machine and go about my business. An hour later, I put the clothes in the dryer (wake up! I saw you nodding your head, this is very interesting). An hour later, I fold them. When I fold them, I put each item in one of six stacks. We are pre-sorting for the family members here. I have a stack for the parents and each of the children. Dump their folded stack on their bed, boom, we always have clean laundry. The children put their own laundry away. Some of us are more dependable than others in putting laundry away. I will not name any names, but one of us who is 16 years old does not get to have his smartphone each day until his laundry is put away. The other thing I do every day is keep a lot of nice thick kitchen rags in a drawer. I like Williams-Sonoma's and everything there is expensive but I can almost always find them on sale in some tired pile in the back of the store, in off-season colors. Get a rag soaking but not dripping wet and drop a lil bit of Murphy's Oil soap on there, or whatever cleaner you like the smell of. And I wipe the kitchen counters and kitchen table over and over throughout the day. Somehow a bedroom with a bed that's been made, and a kitchen with a wiped table and counters just make the whole house seem put together. These rags get hung up to dry and switched out every day so they don't get stinky. Beyond the daily rag scene, about once a week I do a more deep clean of the counters and sink with Soft Scrub. Another thing I do every day is pick up clutter. The severity of this job depends on the ages of the people in my household. Right now I have a one year old. This is a lot like having a raccoon in the house, only cuter. She dumps everything out constantly and chews stuff up. So there is a lot of clutter picking up every day. I like to keep baskets around the house to throw the clutter in. A basket of random toys looks like it is happy and is supposed to be there rather than stuff strewn about. I have found that there are certain times of day I can try to have the clutter under control such as last thing at night, and after lunch. The rest of the time: bomb. | Beyond that, the deeper cleaning happens once a week. It was a glorious day when my eldest daughter took over cleaning one of our bathrooms (we have three.) Now our next oldest daughter cleans the other so I do the master bath. I do not like cleaning bathrooms, and I have to force myself to do it. The way I've made myself clean the bathroom every week is four-fold.
Incidentally, I felt quite victorious one day recently when I said something about dreading cleaning the bathrooms and one of the children was surprised and said, "You don't like cleaning the bathrooms Mom? I never knew that." I had actually managed to have a good attitude rather than just pretend. |
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