by Valerie Plowman
Moms are busy. It doesn’t matter if you are a working mom, work from home mom, or a stay at home mom, you are a busy! A huge difficulty as a mom is to find ways to stay up on your necessary house tasks while still allowing time to be a mom in ways other than a housekeeper. This post isn’t intended to give you the pep talk on “spend time with the kids, not time cleaning.” Yes, we all want to spend time with our kids, but we do also have things we need to do each day, and that is okay! The trick is figuring out how to best accomplish those things so there is still time to fulfill other roles in your life. Here are some tips on getting those tasks done efficiently and with wisdom.
1-Have a Plan/Schedule
I find it very helpful to have a cleaning plan and schedule. I have certain days I clean certain things each week. I also make a plan for what additional things I want to get done during the week.
To see more details on how I manage my chores throughout the week, see this post: How I Do It: Chores. To see how I plan my meals, see this post: How I Do It: Meals.
2-Make Lists
I keep lists of things I need to get done. I have always been a list maker, and I have noticed as I have gotten more children and as my children have gotten older and busier, I really need lists just to free up some head space! I can’t keep it all in my head. I used to do lists with paper, but I now use my iPhone. I put stuff in my list as soon as I think of it. I initially used my Notes on the iPhone. I now use two different apps.
For my personal “to-dos” I use Mom’s Daily Planner by Yadahome.com. I just use the free version and so far only use the “to-do list” function. It has been very helpful for me in organizing my to-dos. I can categorize and prioritize my lists. I can assign due dates and look at what is only due that day, which makes the list more manageable I can also look at the entire list of what I have open if I need to.
For keeping the entire family on the same schedule, my favorite app is Cozi. We also use the free version of this. My husband and I have the same app, and when I put something in, it updates on his phone as well. We keep our family calendar on it. We also keep our shopping lists on it. You can also have “to-do” lists on Cozi (good place for a honey-do?).
Lists help me keep track of everything I need to get done and where I need to be.
3-Start with Scriptures
I find that when I start my day with scripture study, I am able to get so much more done in my day. I have found this to be true ever since I was a teenager, and I never miss an opportunity to share about it. Put it to the test!
4-Let Things Go
If you are feeling overwhelmed and like you don’t have the time or means to do it all, figure out what you can let go. Sure, cleaning the blinds monthly would be great. But how much do you NEED to do that? Just think through the expectations you are putting on yourself and cut back where you can. For more on this idea, see my post Pregnancy: Think Through Abilities. It is directed to pregnant mothers, but it can easily be applied to all situations where you need to cut back. You can also see “Good Sacrifice vs. Foolish Sacrifice” and “Slow the Pace.”
5-Don’t Clean All Day
It took me until my third child to figure this one out. Don’t clean all day! When you have young kids, you can easily spend the day following them around and cleaning everything up as they go. Then you get frustrated when a new mess is made because you just cleaned that area! One Dad I know was left to be a “stay at home dad” for a week while his wife was away. He started complaining about cleaning all day and I told him to just let it go. You will find you are a nicer parent when you pick once or twice a day to focus on picking up the house. See more on this under 9 below–Work as a Family.
Now, you want to balance this idea with the good practice of having your children clean up after themselves. With young children, you need to help them clean. So you do want to instill good habits of cleaning up after themselves, but that doesn’t mean you follow them around cleaning the trail they leave behind them–that is not teaching good habits.
I do my main chore in the morning. I try to clean up after meals. I then do the pick up in the evening before kids go to bed.
6-Early To Rise
This one isn’t very popular, but if you can get up early, you will find you are able to get so much more done in a day! Getting up early means you are up before your children, and we all know doing things without the help of our children is much faster and easier than doing it with the help of our children 
. So, even just an extra thirty minutes in the morning could do a lot for your “to-do” list.
7-Keep Things Presentable
My main goal for my house these days is just to keep things presentable–keep things in a state that if I had an unexpected visitor, I wouldn’t be totally embarrassed. This is definitely easier said than done, and I have plenty of embarrassing visits, but it helps give me an end-goal that I can focus on for each day.
8-Pretend Company is Coming
I once had a friend comment on Facebook about how much faster she worked when company was coming over. Isn’t that so true! If you want to clean your house in a hurry, pretend company will be there in 15 minutes. Clean like crazy for those 15 minutes.
And of course, actually inviting someone over can accomplish the same thing. Company coming is a great clutter-reducer for me
9-Work as a Family
When I decided a few years ago to stop cleaning all day long, I figured the best time for things to get very clean was right before bedtime. My children are all required to help clean up before bed. Everyone helps clean, then we do our bedtime routine, then the kids are put in bed, and the house is clean for about 12 hours!
A great thing about doing this is that the children think about what kind of mess they are making because they know they will be cleaning it up. You don’t have to do this before bed–you can pick any time of day.
10-Hire It Out
Sometimes you just need to hire it out. Many families I know who have both parents working find hiring someone to come in and clean 2-4 times a month well worth the investment. I “hire out” my children to help me with deep cleaning–I used deep cleaning as the jobs they can do to earn money. You might find there is something you want to hire out, whether it is a neighbor teenager, a professional, or your own children.
Valerie is wife to one and mother to four. She blogs at www.babywisemom.com
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by Rachel Norman (Babywise Friendly Blog Network newest guest poster!)
Discipline can be such a nasty word, huh? It makes me think of military drills, punishment and a mother giving a dirty look while pointing a finger. But really, discipline simply means training, and training is a positive thing. It’s not always easy and it’s not always fun, but it goes part and parcel with parenting. In my short time of mothering (to a 25 month old and a 12 month old) I have also found that disciplining my children requires discipline on my part.
Thoughts on the discipline it takes to discipline.
(1) Consistency is key. If a hard and fast rule of parenting existed (and I don’t know about you, but I wish a whole lot of them did) then consistency would come in at the top. To properly communicate a message to our children without confusing them we must be consistent. A child must know what we require of them before we can expect them to follow through. If say “no kicking” but rarely discipline the act then they will start to wonder what’s going on. So… does mommy mean it? Does she not? Oh… only ever 4th time she repeats it does she really mean it. Being consistent with carrying out discipline, giving instructions, and our routines show our children that they can depend on our word. It is easy to give a directive and just hope – really really hope – that they do it, but then stay on the couch drinking our Diet Coke while they happily ignore us. Why would they listen to our instructions first time if we did this? Answer, they won’t. Consistency requires a large amount of discipline on our parts. Sometimes the absolute last thing in the entire planet I want to do is use time out, put someone in isolation or – don’t judge – stand up from where I’m sitting. Graceful mamas, we gotta mean what we say and say what we mean, don’t we?
(2) Discipline doesn’t take the short-sighted approach. Discipline and training, by nature, takes a long term approach. I’ve found that the majority of the time the best approach rarely allows for the short cut. Whether it’s sleep training, teaching a discipline concept (first time obedience, don’t walk in the road, don’t stuff bananas in your brother’s ear, etc.) or table manners discipline means that we put in the time now for the payout later (see my article on Credit Card Parenting). This takes discipline. If you have decided you will not nurse to sleep, but sleep train by putting a child in the crib drowsy then you’ll come across this dilemma. It takes discipline in the middle of the night to say “No, I won’t nurse her back to sleep for the 35th time since midnight” when we know it’s the quickest way to get her to stop crying and hit the sack. Sure, that’s a good solution for the next 45 minutes, but what about afterwards? Discipline says “this will require more effort now” instead of “what can I do to make the next hour easier.”
(3) Discipline requires forethought. My husband and I had this talk the other day. He says to me, “Ella Kate keeps standing up in the crib when I put her in there for nap time. Then I go back and lay her down then she stands up again and waves, then I go back, etc. She doesn’t listen to me” And I laughed and said, “Well, that’s because I don’t make her do that. She can stand up and wave at me when I leave. She still takes her nap.” See, we were requiring – or not requiring – two separate things and so our daughter was confused why daddy was making such a big deal of it. This was a miscommunication on our part, but the majority of the time we know ahead of time what we do in given situations. I wrote an article on Parenting by Strategy vs. Parenting by Instinct where I talked about the importance of thinking through our discipline choices before they happen. What will we do when our toddler does x? How will we handle kicking, biting or screaming? What happens when he throws himself down on the floor because we made him stop eating sand? Thinking through scenarios beforehand and having some solid and consistent disciplinary measures in place help make training go more smoothly. Plus, you can talk about them with your spouse or child carers so that within reason everyone is responding in similar ways to the child’s behavior.
Training and discipline requires planning. Flying by the seat of your pants only requires reflex. Our reflexes or first reactions will not necessarily be wise or appropriate. That’s why soldiers, athletes and other specialists do training and simulation manoeuvres over and over and over and over and over. They do it so many times that the right way and the best way with the highest chance of success become second nature. This is why disciplining our children requires us to be rather disciplined ourselves. It isn’t easy, but neither is labor… and it’s worth it.
I’m Rachel and I blog at A Mother Far from Home. Over there I write on parenting, pregnancy, shepherding our children’s spiritual journeys, lessons learned and some tips and wisdom when I can find them. Thanks for having me, Graceful Mothers!
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