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How To Be A Happy Housewife: Love What You Must Do

April 26, 2017

Are you having trouble feeling motivated to get up and do your housework and mothering tasks all over again? So much of motherhood and housewifery involves the same tasks over and over again, with little to show for your efforts at the end of the day.

The same thing goes for housework. You wash a full sink of dishes after breakfast, but then it just fills up again after lunch and dinner. There’s hardly time to enjoy the results before those results are undone!

The tasks of motherhood and housekeeping can wear on you like a dripping faucet unless you make sure to get your head on straight.

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How To Manage Your Home Like the Best Boutique Hotel

March 30, 2017

I was watching a YouTube video the other day over at the Daily Connoisseur entitled, Five Tips to an Efficient Home, and I was struck by one of Jennifer’s tips.

She advised that you treat your home as if it were a boutique hotel. She didn’t go into a whole lot of detail about how exactly to achieve this, but I thought the idea was so creative, and a great way to change your mindset in regards to how you view your home, and the time spent maintaining it.

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Our Children’s Chores

February 7, 2017

I thought it might be helpful to write out what chores each of my children are currently doing, and how often. A lot of times, we parents underestimate the type of work our children are capable of performing.

If you start your children out at a young age and make chores fun, but also non-negotiable, you will have an easier time of it.

Constantly shoot for excellence, while not being nit-picky. It’s a strange kind of balance. You want your children to master their current level of chores before you move them up to the next level.

If you want your children to get to the point where they are executing their chores at a high level, then “you must inspect what you expect”. I heard that term from another mom years ago, and it has stuck..

It’s so true, though. If you want your children to learn to complete their chores correctly, then you need to take the time to go inspect their work. And you need to make them re-do it as many times as necessary to do it right.

Never get frustrated or angry for work that isn’t quite up to snuff. Just be very matter-of-fact about it. They have to come back and re-do any work that isn’t done properly. Point out where they fell short (nicely), and ask them to fix it.

The first few times, you can expect to have to instruct several times before it’s good enough to be finished. As your child begins to understand exactly what you expect and your standard, he will be able to get it right the first time.

You will still need to inspect the work occasionally, even after your child has gotten it right several times in a row. A once a week spot check should do the trick.

14 yr old—My 14-year-old has just recently graduated from dish duty altogether. He couldn’t be happier! He currently helps set the table for dinner, cleans out and vacuums the van once per week, vacuums the living room twice per week, cleans the showers/tubs twice a month, vacuums the upstairs and the stairs once per week, and wipes down the upper cabinets twice per month.

12 yr old—My 12-year old does the breakfast dishes, helps set the dinner table, vacuums the living room twice per week, sweeps and mops the kitchen, dining room, foyer, and bathrooms once per week.

10 yr old—My 10-year-old does the dinner dishes, vacuums the living room twice per week, cleans all of the toilets daily, and wipes down the bathroom countertops daily.

8 yr old—My 8-year-old unloads the dishwasher in the morning, and does the lunch dishes, she also helps me keep the kitchen swept.

7 yr old—My 7-year-old unloads the dishwasher in the afternoon, and is in charge of wiping off the dining room table after each meal, she also helps keep the kitchen swept.

5 yr old—My 5-year-old sweeps the dining room after each meal, and helps clear off the dishes after each meal. He also keeps the shoes in the sunroom organized, and the room vacuumed once per week.

3 yr old—My 3-year-old empties all of the little trash cans around the house daily (in each bathroom, and in my room).

We all work together to keep the house picked up, and I’ve trained several of the children in how to help me keep the laundry running. I do all of the folding and pre-treating. They all put their own laundry away after it has been folded/sorted.

In the summertime, the three oldest boys work together to get the mowing and edging done. With a riding lawn mower, a push mower, and a weed-whacker, they make pretty quick work of it!

We do pay the children for their chores, but I deduct money for bad attitudes and shoddy work (not during the instruction period, but for obvious laziness). All weekly work must be completed by Saturday at noon to count. For the older children, I do not offer reminders. It’s either done on time for pay, or it isn’t done on time which means I don’t pay, and they still have to complete the chore.

This system has worked really well for us for over a year now. The children are thrilled that they get to make money, I’m thrilled to not have to do the work myself.

Four Tips For Decluttering Your Home

February 6, 2017

I have been working on decluttering my home, big-time, for the last month. We have lived in this house for almost four years now, and the clutter is starting to accumulate again.

More clutter means more time cleaning and organizing, and I would just rather spend that time elsewhere. I sneak decluttering into my day, in the same way, I sneak in cleaning and tidying up.

A little bit here, a little bit there, and before you know it, you’ve got a whole room that has been decluttered, and the feeling is amazing! Here are the steps that I go through when I am decluttering.

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Day in the Life of a Mom of Nine

January 24, 2017

Whenever I meet someone new, and that person finds out how many children I have, one of the first things my new friend will say is some version of, “I wish that I could spend a day at your home watching how a mom of nine gets it all done.”

I understand the feeling. When I only had three or four children but was dreaming of more, I felt the same way about mothers of many. I wanted to see how they ordered their day:

to keep from going crazy
to keep the house from falling apart
to educate their children
to feed reasonably healthy meals

I also wanted an inside look into how a mom of nine handled life’s frustrations as they inevitably came up. You know, you have this picture in your head of what motherhood will be like, and it rarely turns out that way. So I wanted to see what motherhood REALLY looked like when there were a ton of children.

What an Average Day Looks Like For a Mom of Nine

5:45—I get up and get some work done before the children are awake. We have a family rule that the children must stay in their beds until 7:30, so this gives me uninterrupted time.

7:30—The oldest children are up and start working on their schoolwork, the youngest few sleep for a bit longer. I go ahead and grab a shower and do my 10 Minute Beauty Routine. I get the laundry going.

8:00-8:30-9:00—I feed the baby, put out a few fires, check math from the previous day and mark today’s assignments, have the children do chores and get dressed.

9:00-10:00—Make and eat breakfast, read the children a Proverb, and do a devotional with the younger kids, the older kids do their own Bible reading as part of their day, so they go get back to work on school.

10:00-12:00—I lay the baby down for his nap, start a new load of laundry, do math and reading lessons with the youngest who still need my help (the 5, and 7-year old mostly, but the 8 and 10-year old regularly still come and get help with math). This is probably the craziest part of my day, as sometimes I will have a line 4-children long of people needing math help. Occasionally, one of the oldest two will jump in line too. Everyone does math at the same time, and they generally finish around the same time too.

I have a rule that no one is allowed to interrupt during a reading lesson. It’s too hard for the child trying to learn if we are constantly being interrupted. Two children are doing reading lessons right now.

During all of this math and reading instruction, I am keeping the 3-year old and the 18-month old toddler wrangled in the living room. We have gates that section this room off from the rest of the downstairs. On the blessedly calm days, the 3-year old colors (which he calls math), and it’s wonderful. On the normal days, he and the other toddler wrestle or make forts. It can get a little crazy, and I normally have to separate them at some point.

12:00-1:00—I get the baby up, start a new load of laundry, feed the baby, and finish up with any reading instruction, or math help that had to wait. I like to get a story in at this point with one of the monthly themed picture-story books that I get from the library.

1:00-2:00—I prepare and serve lunch for the younger half, the older half create their own. We will have sandwiches, I almost always have a big pot of beans, cilantro lime rice, and chicken cooked up, sometimes there are leftovers. It’s a casual affair. I sneak in a little cleaning during this time in the kitchen.

Between 1:30 and 1:45 I get the 3-year old and the 18-month old down for afternoon naps. I read them a story first, we sing a song or two, and then they go down, and I start a new load of laundry.

2:00-2:30—We listen to an audiobook, I start working again, I put the baby down for his nap at 2:30.

2:30-4:30. The children are usually done with school before lunch, so they have free playtime now. We have neighbors who live across the street, and they all play together over here or over there. For the most part, they are playing outside. I exercise up in my room at 4:00, and the 3-year old usually gets up around 3:30 or 4:00, and will snuggle for a while, and then go out and play on our deck (we have a huge enclosed deck).

4:30-6:00—I get the youngest two up, feed the baby and the toddler gets to go play on the deck with a bigger kid, usually one of the girls like to take him out, but the older boys do it too. Usually, by this time, everyone is playing on the deck anyway. At 5:00, everything stops and temporarily, everyone comes in to clean up the downstairs, vacuum, one of the children does a quick clean of all of the bathrooms, and another child unloads the dishwasher, then they all go back outside on the deck. I am cooking dinner at this point.

6:00-7:45—We eat dinner. Most evenings, my husband will do a devotional at the table. I go upstairs to get all of the laundry folded that didn’t get folded throughout the day, the dining room gets cleaned up, the dishes get done.

7:45-8:15—All of the kids put their folded laundry away, and then, it’s bedtime for the younger crowd. The kids get pajamas on, etc. My husband handles the story time, saying of prayers, tucking in, etc and I go downstairs and sit on the couch and take a breather.

8:15-10:30—The older kids stay up until 9:00, then go to bed. Ryan and I will watch TV, talk, etc. during this time, and then turn in for the night.

So that’s the gist of my day. Some days are Murphy’s Law type days, and things go wrong, so we get out of routine, but that’s okay. Other days, we have a commitment outside of the home (Wednesday afternoon and Thursday evenings are martial arts, every other Thursday is knitting class for the girls, and Friday is speech and debate for the older boys), so those days look drastically different.

Thankfully, our mornings are solid, and that is where we get all of our homeschooling in. I don’t schedule appointments or any outings in the morning unless it is a really special circumstance. It’s just too hard to maximize the day when the morning routine is compromised.

The two constants in our mornings are Bible at breakfast and math. Everything else is negotiable.

So that’s what a Day in the Life of this mom of nine children is like. On another day I will have to post what my life looked like when all of my children were much younger. Now that was crazy.

What an Average Day Looks Like For a Mom of Nine

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