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Are you a full time mom? Do you battle to keep up with juggling housework & EVERYTHING, all the time?
Recently I have been struggling to keep up with all of it – kids and education & quality time, housework, never ending piles of laundry and dishes, cooking & time to nap so growing baby no.3 can grow nicely. With burnout pending, I asked online for some fellow mom friends advice on how they manage to juggle it all with no domestic help, and still maintain some sanity.
Here are some of their helpful housework-handy tips!
Training your children:
‘How old are your children? You need to train the kids to work along with you and help you. Make it part of ‘school’ time and call it Life Skills. You might also need to lower your standards, especially while you are pregnant. Decide what is really important and leave the rest (like ironing!!) It gets easier as the children get older and more capable of helping and being responsible. At preschool age they are usually part of the problem, not part of the solution!
~I recall this being part of the Moore’s homeschooling system, plan on getting it in the next 2/3 yrs, as I see the merit in getting your kids to be part of the housework team, per se. 🙂
Implement clever storage containers for toys:
It really helps to realize that your house won’t be perfectly neat. I think of our house as being a daycare. Show we one that is perfectly neat all the time! With LO’s around you just can’t keep it that way and keep your sanity. Well maybe some super women can, but I’m not one of them! And it does get better. Mine is 3 and 5 and they help put away toys (sometimes and love little tasks. I think letting them help also helps to keep them busy and thus they have less time to create chaos.
I know mine especially love tasks that involve water such as washing dishes (the plastics and non breakables), walls, windows etc. Of cause it’s not perfect, but it is cleaner than it was before. And get toy boxes/containers (I find old ice-cream containers works well for smaller toys). It will take you and them a while to sort out the toys. But once it is done find a place to store it all (We’ve got a big wall with shelves). They can then only play with one box at a time and have to pack the toys away before they can get the next box.
Funnily they enjoy putting stuff away if they know where to put it and that they can get new ones once they are finished. It is also amazing to realize after a while that they are always playing with only a few boxes. The rest of the stuff is just things that lay around frustrating mom.And remember “cleaning while your kids are still growing is like shovelling snow while it is still snowing”.
~I love that quote hehe! And too true – containers really do work, things have gotten a bit less-crazy since I started packing toys that way!
Planning is key:
Planning also plays a big role. Plan the night before what you want to do the next day, and get things ready the night before. Be flexable within your plans. Get the kids in a good bedtime routine. Get up before your children in the morning.
~ All of the above!! Hard to do, especially getting out of bed before the kids, but each time I do that, I get a headstart on housework and other little niggly things, which is marvelous! Makes me a calmer mom too!
Batching housework chores into their own days:
- We have a rough plan that I try to stick with: play dates on Tuesdays and Fridays. Cleaning on Mondays and Thursdays and wed I try and spend half the day with each child. Inbetween all that we try and juggle doing some work with my oldest every day (or second day) and sitting on my bum and play with my little princess! Just dont be hard on yourself and try things that work for you!!!
~ Got to agree with the housework on certain days, as trying to do a bit of everything every day wears me out!! And not being so hard on myself!! Can definitely learn from that!
Learning to relax:
- I have a lady that comes in once a week, to do big cleaning(Wednesday’s), other than that is still mop/vacuum/dust once or twice a week, as we have visitors in our home nearly everyday. I took me a while to get to this, and as hubby says we still have periods of chaos. Firstly I try to put what is in my hand away, eg clothing from the day(that we wore) – still working on that then I do dishes in the evenings, so I have a clean home when we wake the next morning. Monday morning is a big cleanup as over the weekends we often have dinner guests and then I also tend to relax more. I don’t have a dishwasher, so I do dishes 3 times a day so it does not pile. Laundry I wash/fold Monday and Tuesdays, fold Wednesday mornings….(still working on that as well)… And then I have learned to relax, the kids comes first, and even if people come to visit, and it is a mess, I remind them we are human, and they usually don’t even see it. Good luck..
~ I like the idea of ‘batching’ housework – doing laundry on set days as opposed to EVERY day.
The most awesome TIPS site for homemaking & housework:
- And finally, keeping the best TIP for last.. a friend sent me this link which made for hours of browsing and reading, I am speechless! 🙂
How do YOU keep ontop of everything and keep sane?
Are you a fulltime mom with no domestic help? We’d love to get some tips from you!! Chat to us about how you manage your housework, in the Comments section below!
Caryl Anne says
These are great ideas! I love how you mentioned that you have to learn to relax. This one tip can be difficult to remember at times, but we are all human and nobody is perfect. Personally, remembering this has helped me to keep my sanity! Thanks for sharing!
Eric says
Great ideas. I would say the most important of them all would have to be train your children. I think we would all agree children pick up on all the things that we do. Teaching our children to put their things where they belong (assuming one has created the place for it, hint, hint) is just how we do it. Well… is it actually what we as parents are doing?? Teaching by example and explaining how and why can be more impactfull than anything else.
Dawn says
Great post. Thanks for the tips! Love these kinds. Now I’ve just got to find a way to manage the house while working 8 hours Monday-Friday too… :/