Here’s another blog post on the subject of young SAHMs and how to do a reasonably good job while staying sane:
thesinceregift.wordpress.com/2014/03/20/a-letter-to-young-sahms-from-one-who-is-slightly-older/
(cut for length)
Oh my goodness, this is SO TRUE.
I grew up in a dysfunctional and very dirty house. I don’t mean messy, where it’s just a question of books and toys left lying around. I mean dirty, as in vacuuming/mopping rarely done, food left out all over the place, and, at various points, incontinent animals allowed to do their business anywhere, up to and including food prep surfaces.
Now, I did teach myself how to clean, because I am by nature something of a neat freak. I can’t relax if the house isn’t tidy and at least somewhat clean. However, I didn’t know how to clean
efficiently until I had DD, when it became a case of necessary trial-and-error in that regard.
When you’re a first-time mom with a screaming newborn, dishes tend to rank rather lower than getting the baby settled, which led, I kid you not, to a fair number of times wherein I’d be up with the baby at 2 AM and, once she fell asleep, would spend an hour when I could be sleeping tidying the living room, starting the laundry, loading the dishwasher, etc, because I felt like I didn’t deserve to relax until that was all sorted. Crazy!
I eventually figured out that if I got the dishwasher emptied first thing in the morning, the kitchen tended to get and stay much cleaner. Why? Because emptying the dishwasher seemed intimidating when there were already dirty dishes piling up. If I emptied the dishwasher, then I could put dirty dishes straight into it over the course of the day, and by dinnertime, just had to throw the dinner dishes in it and run it, and voila! The kitchen was a lot tidier than it had been.
I later worked in getting the counters wiped down, the pots and pans washed promptly, and so on, but just that one little thing made a huge difference in both cleanliness and stress levels.
As to the rest, I eventually wrote out a very brief weekly schedule of chores that didn’t have to be done as often as, say, cleaning the kitchen. Mondays, the floors get mopped; Tuesdays, the upstairs gets vacuumed, Wednesday, the bathrooms get done, and so on. That also made a big difference in my overall morale level.
About the hired help: I suspect it may be easier to get by without this if one has older, helpful kids, though I could be wrong about that. At the very least, I imagine one can tell, say, a 10-year-old to play with the toddler for half an hour while one cleans the bathrooms, rather than having the toddler underfoot. (And this suggests that the kids
are at home all day, too, which isn’t true of most families.) A couple of months ago, my MIL came in for a week and took care of DD (toddler) for an hour or two every morning. I was stunned by how much I’d get done. As I put it one morning when she walked in with DD: “I vacuumed the ground floor, dusted, mopped, loaded the dishwasher, started dinner, returned three phone calls, caught up on all paperwork, and still had time to relax with a cup of coffee and the Internet for twenty minutes! That was amazing!”
Based on that, I’m thinking of either putting DD in a MDO-type program next year, or perhaps paying a friend with other toddlers to watch DD for a few hours a morning or two each week. As it is now, phone calls are difficult at best (DD thinks that phone calls are a personal insult, and screams accordingly during them…you try dealing with an insurance company voice-operated phone system with a screaming toddler, much less discussing intricate billing details!), and paperwork ditto. And housework is so much simpler when one doesn’t have to plan every trip up and down the stairs as if one was invading Normandy. (“Do I take the toddler with me, not be able to carry very much, and take five times as long because she wants to walk up and down the stairs a dozen times, or do I do it by myself, get much more done in much less time, and have her throw a twenty-minute tantrum because she didn’t come?”)
Seriously, though, it’s hard. I can’t remember the last time my entire house was clean at the same time. I’ve gotten better at not caring, though.
)
