Mom’s Chores

I have heard from many friends and from personal experience that keeping the house clean is becoming a full time job! No one wants to clean non-stop, even the OCD neat freak like me! I will be the first to admit that there are days that all I want to do is sit down with a good book and relax…however, if I do that I start to fall behind in my housework and we all know what happens then!

If you let yourself fall behind, cleaning the house becomes overwhelming and seems like you will never get caught back up. I used to just clean as I saw it was needed with no real schedule or plan for each day. However, the more I thought about it the more I realized that I was being silly. We make cleaning schedules for our children’s chores and if they don’t do them each day there are consequences. I am currently working on more posts for children’s chores which made me think that I will change how I do mine as well.

For a while now I have had a daily cleaning schedule for myself that I keep posted on the refrigerator. This schedule makes it so that I can spend about an hour a day cleaning and my house still stay decent. Mind you this schedule keeps my house looking “lived in” but clean. I have come to the realization that with children and animals (we have a ton of animals) if I were to try and keep my house spotless I would be cleaning and probably yelling non-stop!!

I do not want to live that way! I want to spend the majority of my days with my girls…not cleaning up after them! This is also part of the reason that I have implemented strict chores for my oldest and will add my younger daughters chores in as she gets old enough to do things. Having the children responsible for small things such as: empty the trash, pick up your toys, dust shelves, sweep/vacuum the floor, etc. makes it so that  we can spend more time together having fun.

Heck, my oldest daughter is four and she seems to LOVE helping mommy clean the house. She feels responsible and proud of her accomplishments. Part of this probably stems from her being in a Montessori school for most of her childhood so far. However, the things that she learned in this school are easily taught within the home. I will do a post on Montessori and how to implement it in your home later 🙂

Okay, sorry for getting off topic there for a bit…now where was I? Oh yeah, I don’t want to spend my days upset because my kids were kids and made a mess. I hate yelling…it just isn’t in my nature to yell! I would much rather have a system set up so that I don’t have to yell to get my point across. For some ideas read the post I did on creative consequences a little while back. I found that if I set myself up a chore schedule just like I do my kids then things get done without a problem. I think I am going to change it from a list on the refrigerator to a board just like my girls have. This way we can all do our chores the exact same way and at the same time. Whenever I get the boards complete (hopefully this weekend) I will put up a few pictures 🙂

HOPE THIS IS HELPFUL TO YOU GUYS! 🙂

Below is the schedule that really seems to work for me (please let me know if you have any suggestions to add or change or remove from the schedule):

*Some of these will be done by or assisted by the kids. I will put a * next to those that I expect the kids to participate in. (They don’t do it all everyday…just some of the time. Chores 2 will have a more detailed idea of what I expect from my kids for their chores. Hopefully this post will be up in a few more days!)