“Have you managed to train your kids to keep the house tidy as they go? ”

The house stays in reasonable condition if I stay on top of things and make sure everyone does what they’re supposed to do when they’re supposed to do it. The last couple of weeks I’ve been mentally very preoccupied with a business project I’ve been working on, and when I don’t actively manage, things don’t run as well as usual. So things don’t look as good in that scenario as they should.

I don’t spend much time daily on regular cleaning. I aim for a generally orderly home, not spotless, and your standards might be much higher than mine. Usually if someone were to come in to my house, they would find most of the main floor (living room, dining room, kitchen) in process, because those are constantly in use, since that’s where we spend our time all day long.

What I do is the following: morning chores for 15 minutes – this means wiping down the breakfast table and washing dishes for the child whose turn it is, and three times a week the kids do the bathrooms, 2 kids for each bathroom. There is also a quick pickup of the main floor, I usually have my 4 yo or 6 yo sweep all of the main floor. Whoever I feel like nabbing takes out the garbage.

Sporadically, I give them rags and have the younger kids wipe down the walls, which can get grimy over time with fingerprints. I expect them to pick up their bedrooms before they come downstairs in the morning (but honestly, what isn’t regularly inspected isn’t regularly done – so I often send them back up to finish what should have been done earlier:)) Before dinner, I usually have another quick pick up. The kids take turns during the week doing breakfast and dinner dishes (I cook and do lunch dishes, also Saturday and Sunday dishes). I do picking up and putting away through the day, I don’t really schedule that in or think about it – for example, if I see the stove top needs to be wiped down, I just do it. Some people find it more helpful to have schedules for all of the necessary tasks, but I tend to feel overly burdened by lots of schedules.

I don’t do laundry daily. This doesn’t work for me, since it seems there’s always laundry waiting to be put away in that situation. All the laundry is done on Sunday (though often it drags through to Monday if the loads aren’t moved through promptly enough). My two oldest (ds13, dd12) alternate weeks for doing laundry, the younger kids are responsible for bringing the dirty clothes to the basement. I sort the clean stuff into piles (often grabbing a work buddy but just as often not). Then for several hours on Sunday evening, there is a pile of clothes on the couch that steadily grows, and I send each child to their room two or three times with their stuff to put away. (I put it on the couch because I won’t allow it to stay there; the problem with clean laundry is it’s very easy to just shove it to the side and it builds up in clean piles in the spare room.)

When I feel more serious attention is needed to their rooms, on occasional Sunday mornings I gather everyone and tell them we need to get things back in order – I find that things tend to pile up over time. I hate clutter. Hate, hate, hate. I take a garbage bag or two of things to the Goodwill almost every week – yesterday I took four bags. I can’t figure out how I regularly have so many things to pass on, since I’m not an excessive shopper or accumulator in any way. I have seven kids and limited space, and don’t feel I can afford the luxury of keeping things around that aren’t being used, if I want to keep a reasonably tidy house. Cleaning around lots of stuff is just too hard, and there’s plenty of stuff left to clean around even with my constant decluttering. For me, decluttering is an ongoing process.

So to sum up, I spend maybe half an hour daily on home maintenance; what’s most important for me is to use the systems I’ve put into place and remembering that it’s because I have those systems that things run smoothly. Sometimes things seem to just happen on their own, and I forget to give myself credit for creating and maintaining that environment, and then I lapse and don’t do the necessary maintenance. Times like that are actually helpful, though, because it reminds me that the house running smoothly is happening because I’m there to make sure it happens.

Avivah