Does anyone have any thoughts for those of us who haven’t been taught how to clean: how to manage the house and cleaning it amidst the homeschooling, the baby, toddler, and older kids, laundry, shopping needs, exercise, prayer, etc etc.? While I would love to do the kind of cleaning Auntie Leila lays out in this article, I find it extremely daunting. My house is a mess in general; my bedroom is the dumping ground for when we have company coming. Not sure where to begin to tackle this. Any thoughts?
Do click on the "Reasonably Clean House" link. Here I give short little thoughts on how to start (read from the bottom up).
On my blog Like Mother Like Daughter (linked there in the post, scroll down) I have many long posts. In my Summa Domestica I have a whole volume (one of three!) on the subject!
The main thing is to know what is for dinner -- plan your menus! That's the first step. The rest comes little by little! Do you know what is for dinner?
I think in this stage, things are constantly changing, so like Leila says, making sure you *at least* have the meals and laundry under control is so helpful. I have found I have to re-evaluate how I/we are doing in terms of our household routine about every 4-5 months, maybe a little more often with a newer baby, whose sleep patterns and schedules evolve rapidly! So I try to be responsive to what's actually going on in my house with my people.
Example: I save the big, deep-deep cleaning projects for homeschool breaks. If I try to get anything beyond what Leila's describing here as Moderate Clean during school weeks, I will go insane. My husband only has Saturday to do major outdoor/yard/house projects, and if I also try to tackle a big cleaning project, our toddler/preschooler get into more mischief than it's worth, and wer'e both exhausted. So instead, on a Christmas, Easter (well, I do it Holy Week before the feast ;)), and especially summer breaks, I make lists of the rooms that need the deep scrub down. And for me that includes more of the intense wiping down and moving couches, vacumming under all cushions, vacuuming window treatments, etc. Same with a big cleaning of kid's bedrooms, like pulling back furniture and sweeping/wiping back there, reorganizing closet spaces, etc. Everyone's list will be different, but I do feel a lot better about the day to day when I am making sure we (my children do a lot!) are cleaning 1 zone pretty well each day. ( I do go in and kind of insert myself in my kids' weekly chores about every month or so. I think Leila talks about this on the blog! It's a type of damage control :D)
Does anyone have any thoughts for those of us who haven’t been taught how to clean: how to manage the house and cleaning it amidst the homeschooling, the baby, toddler, and older kids, laundry, shopping needs, exercise, prayer, etc etc.? While I would love to do the kind of cleaning Auntie Leila lays out in this article, I find it extremely daunting. My house is a mess in general; my bedroom is the dumping ground for when we have company coming. Not sure where to begin to tackle this. Any thoughts?
Indeed!
Do click on the "Reasonably Clean House" link. Here I give short little thoughts on how to start (read from the bottom up).
On my blog Like Mother Like Daughter (linked there in the post, scroll down) I have many long posts. In my Summa Domestica I have a whole volume (one of three!) on the subject!
The main thing is to know what is for dinner -- plan your menus! That's the first step. The rest comes little by little! Do you know what is for dinner?
I think in this stage, things are constantly changing, so like Leila says, making sure you *at least* have the meals and laundry under control is so helpful. I have found I have to re-evaluate how I/we are doing in terms of our household routine about every 4-5 months, maybe a little more often with a newer baby, whose sleep patterns and schedules evolve rapidly! So I try to be responsive to what's actually going on in my house with my people.
Example: I save the big, deep-deep cleaning projects for homeschool breaks. If I try to get anything beyond what Leila's describing here as Moderate Clean during school weeks, I will go insane. My husband only has Saturday to do major outdoor/yard/house projects, and if I also try to tackle a big cleaning project, our toddler/preschooler get into more mischief than it's worth, and wer'e both exhausted. So instead, on a Christmas, Easter (well, I do it Holy Week before the feast ;)), and especially summer breaks, I make lists of the rooms that need the deep scrub down. And for me that includes more of the intense wiping down and moving couches, vacumming under all cushions, vacuuming window treatments, etc. Same with a big cleaning of kid's bedrooms, like pulling back furniture and sweeping/wiping back there, reorganizing closet spaces, etc. Everyone's list will be different, but I do feel a lot better about the day to day when I am making sure we (my children do a lot!) are cleaning 1 zone pretty well each day. ( I do go in and kind of insert myself in my kids' weekly chores about every month or so. I think Leila talks about this on the blog! It's a type of damage control :D)