Cleaning Day - Friday

Large Family Logistics – Ideal for the family of 2 to the family of 20. A must have in my opinion for any size, the earlier on the better. Keeping life sane and glorious in the midst of pregnancy, babies, toddlers and up, homeschooling and life. The planning I mention below is a small, teensy bit of what the book covers.

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Start by washing all towels, washcloths and handtowels – I trrrrrryyyyy to keep this down to 1 large load a week by recycling clean bath towels. 2 washcloths in the kitchen and 1 hand towel in each bathroom a day.

(Psst…this isn’t in my house)

Before I started reading LFL, I had written every cleaning project down and divided it up over the course of Mon-Fri. The problem with that is on the hectic days things were skipped, which normally wouldn’t have been a bad thing, but it seemed the same two days were very busy for us leaving certain jobs undone for weeks at a time. It’s amazing how in just 5 weeks a single spider can spin a web that looks like it has been there for months, if not years.

Having a Cleaning Day gets everything done in one day and it seems to take a lot less time when we are all working together on a list of items. The flip side to this is, every so often, Cleaning Day will get skipped and then I will just switch it with another day(Kitchen) that I can sacrifice.

Some of my children work best playing beat the timer, sometimes we do the buddy system(an older with a younger), some work best just giving them a list of chores with a  Starburst at the end when finished, Some like work to 15 min, take a 5 min break and repeat, some need to be prodded the eeentiiiire time and they become Mamma’s partner. Working along side your lazy children builds your patience and sharpens YOU while it teaches them work ethic and children looove working alongside their parents, that’s how God created us.

Another tool we have used in our home is if there are two children that seem to be at each others throats, I pair them together. We read over scriptures concerning working together, loving one another and then they are supervised for squabbles. I encourage often to love each other and work together and amazingly this has brought siblings together as buddies for days on end. The Lord has told us to confront our weaknesses and deal with our sinful attitudes, what better way to confront hard hearts in siblings?

I am in a new season of life where the children do the majority of the housework. From Micah to Jess they can get an enormous amount of work done. It is much easier to keep my home cleaner now than it ever was in the past with just 3 or 4 small children. It is a place we are all bound to be, there’s hope and you’ll make it!

As far as rewards go. I do not like rewarding sugar on a daily basis and I can not afford to reward children with dollar store prizes or candy often, that’s not us. We do not pay our children for chores, not that I have anything against doing so, it just doesn’t fit our budget. I try to encourage by singing, kind words, keep the house *happy*, reward with reading a book or 4 player Wii for 20 minutes. This kills 4 birds with one stone.