Iveyrock

After a couple of weird weeks, and even weirder weekends, we spent the day settling back into our normal routine. The basic idea is to have lots of free time, with bits of work thrown in. We have some ebb and flow with where and how we play, and we usually do some sort of project everyday.

I was pleased by how easily we went back into the normal swing of things. Our morning has a flow of a story to pull us all together, and then the big chore for the day. The kids help with the chore, and it rotates based on the day and week. I wasn’t sure how it would go after two weeks off, especially since we haven’t been using this schedule all that long.

But the kids both jumped right in. We read a book today; other days I tell them a made-up story. Then we swept. (Mondays are sweeping days because I have a time every day that toys get picked up. Sometimes this doesn’t work as well on the weekends, if we’re out and about. Monday sweeping means that all floors must be cleared Monday morning, and we start the week fresh.) We got everything swept, and moved on to playing. Once again, I am really pleased with how this routine is working for our family.

Besides the actual focus on NOT cleaning, I think the other reason this schedule is working well is how specific it is. I’ve read different methods of keeping a home clean, and none of them really made sense for the way we actually use our house, or our priorities. Not to mention, I really can’t follow somebody else’s method, and do things just because they say so. So I put a lot of thought into making a schedule that actually fits my needs.

I may have gotten a bit carried away, in fact. Ray came home one night to find me sitting in the middle of a bunch of paper, with lots of circles and scribbles all over them. They included questions like, “what are my ultimate goals for my family?” Sheets of paper covered with every thing that must be done each day, each week, each month, and each year; and a breakdown of what each job entails. And details about what each person in the family needs to be healthy and functioning.

The end result of all this is a schedule that so far, really works for my family. One my favorites things about it is the way I rotate our chores. That means that I will not have a perfectly clean house at any given point in time – which helps me to not switch into crazy-mode trying to keep the house perfect. I have just enough variety through the day to keep it interesting and challenging, and enough stability that I know exactly what needs to be done each day to keep the house running smoothly. If I miss a day, I have a couple of built in times that I can catch back up.

Because I know what I need to do when, I don’t need to spend my mental energy thinking about it, instead of living life with my kids. I am able to be very flexible, because I know exactly what I am not doing, and exactly when I will get to it again. I know exactly when I am doing each chore, so I don’t spend the whole day dreading it, and trying to figure out a way to fit it in. And, perhaps most surprising to me, my house is reasonably clean. I would be happy to have company drop by at any given time… as long as they don’t look in the den.

I love my housekeeping schedule. Really, I do. I know that some of the people who know me well might find that a little hard to believe (hi mom!). But I created this schedule a couple of months ago, and so far it is working.

I really think that one of the main reasons it is working for me is this: the goal of the schedule is to keep me from cleaning my house. See? Easy-peasy.

When I get into housecleaning mode, it kicks my anxiety into high gear. After Chava was born I tried to keep everythink picked up and clean as I went, because I wasn’t sure when I was going to be able to get to it again. While that works well for many people, that is exactly the wrong approach for me. I kept trying to do ‘one more thing’ until suddenly it was 2:00 and I hadn’t eaten lunch.

So a big goal of my schedule is to have a specific time to do the things that need done, and large chunks of time when I am not supposed to be doing anything. When I know there is a time to pick up toys, I don’t spend all day thinking about how I need to do it. I also don’t spend my time obsessing about the toys my kids get out after we’ve just cleaned, because I know exactly when they will get picked up again. I get to spend my time and mental energy focusing on just being with the kids – which is my main goal in life, right now.

Our big project of the day was rotating out our toys. This wasn’t supposed to happen; in fact, we’d already done our main chore for the day (cleaning cobwebs). Impromptue organizing projetcs don’t always work well for me; my idea of how things are supposed to be organized tends to look different than the kids’ vision. The fact that this was all about sorting toys was just the icing on the cake.

However, the whole thing actually went really well. Ian was able to listen to what I needed (do not drag the toys out of the bag and attempt to play with all of them at once; put them in a pile over here until we’ve sorted them). Both he and Chava were surprisingly good at putting some toys aside to donate. I haven’t done that with the kids before, although they’ve seen the box that is set to be donated. Ian was able to tell me what he thought he should keep, and why. He has a startling memory for where each toy came from, and how he has played with it in the past. We ended up with a good pile of toys to keep, and managed to put the cheap plastic toys from the doctor’s office into the ‘donate’ box.

The next step was putting up the toys that had been out. I was a little sad to put up the house that we gave Chava for her birthday, but she has stopped playing with it in the last couple of weeks. I pulled down their castle, which is one of Ian’s favorite toys (I happen to like it quite a bit, too). They played happily for the rest of the afternoon.

I am always a little amused by how well this system works. They play much better when they have less clutter to try to play around, and less choices to overwhelm them. They are more likely to play with the toys, play with them longer, and are more creative in their play. Even better, when we rotate the toys that have been put up for awhile, it’s a little bit like Christmas.

All in all, a complete success. The kids were helpful, and I didn’t get overwhelmed. I accomplished two goals: rotating toys and working on making the den a useful space. We all had a good time together, and the kids have a bunch of ‘new’ toys.