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by Kim Brenneman
The key thing to keeping your home consistently clean is a consistent chore time. It does not mean that you and your family clean and then sit around twiddling your thumbs in order to keep it clean. You can still be creative and messy, the children can still play with playdough and legos; you simply need a system for everyone to help get things cleaned up and back into place. The key thing to keeping your home consistently clean is a consistent chore time. Every work day of the week do the work. Deuteronomy 5:13 Work is not discouraging unless we let it be discouraging. Work is simply the process needed to get to an end point. In this case I am talking about a clean house, the goal of every keeper of the home in the world. When a large homeschooling family lives in a home 24 hours a day, seven days a week, things get dirty, messes are made, clutter is left lying around, and small children create chaos. Yes, it will be a mess--it’s a fact. Don’t let it discourage you, just get to work. Make the work a habit that happens without thought and it becomes easy work that can be done quickly. Then there will be more time to do things that... create more work. Now smile! Work is simply the process needed to get to an end point. You want a clean house, you want to do fun things that give you pleasure–living is work. Work is living, work is fun if you make it fun, and work is a joy because it is serving the Lord. Rest is what God has given to us for our physical bodies on the seventh day. Rest is not something that you do during the daylight hours unless you are ill, work nights, or are post partum. Clean is not the only goal of the home keeper. The home keeper also wants her family to live with love, comfort, and happiness. These are intangibles that have more to do with atmosphere and attitude. It is hard to create the atmosphere and attitude of love, comfort, and happiness in our homes if our homes are pig pens and we moms are drowning in self-pity. Have you ever watched pigs or seen their pen? Pigs root around with their noses turning over anything and everything in order to find something to eat. This process is very destructive to the place they are kept. They eat anything and everything. Pigs will wallow, they move their bodies around in the dirt in order to create a bed and when it rains into their wallow, it becomes a mud bath where they take residence until cold weather when they pile on top of each other and suffocate the pigs at the bottom of the pig pile. So understand this--pigs wallow in the mud, sleep in the mud, root around destroying things for food, eat anything and everything, and then pile on each other with no regard for their fellow pigs and kill the pigs who can’t get out from underneath. Think of the word images that come from the lifestyle of pigs, “pig pen” “wallow like a pig” “pig pile”. Imagine a family doing the same thing: rummaging through cupboards looking for food and then wallowing about in their mess, never cleaning and then sleeping in their mess. It happens, I’ve seen it up close and personal! It is our nature to be lazy. We must renounce ungodly habits and worldly passions. "How long will you lie there, you sluggard? "For the grace of God has appeared, bringing salvation for all people, training us to renounce ungodliness and worldly passions, and to live self-controlled, upright, and godly lives in the present age, waiting for our blessed hope, the appearing of the glory of our great God and Savior Jesus Christ, who gave himself for us to redeem us from all lawlessness and to purify for himself a people for his own possession who are zealous for good works." Keeping your home tidy and clean is as simple as keeping a daily chore time. It is important to my husband that the house be tidy in order for him to have a relaxing evening so we hold "Afternoon Choretime" every day. This is the time of day that we restore order. We put away the schoolbooks and projects that we were working on. If it’s a large project that we will come back to the next day, we tuck it away in a safe place and straighten up as much as possible around the project. We make the mood one that Dad can come into and relax in and enjoy his family. We have food cooking that tantalizes the senses for an enjoyable family suppertime. We listen to calming music that sets the mood for the evening. All these things are done in the hour or two before Dad arrives home. We are setting a place for the king of the castle. Let me show you how to go from the creative chaotic homeschool home to a relaxing haven of rest for your family. First you will need to announce to the house that it is "Afternoon Choretime" and tell the children to quickly put away whatever they are working on. While you are instructing them, light a candle (high out of reach of the littlest climbers of course) and put on music. This helps signal to the children that evening is coming and it is time to prepare for it. Then go to your bedroom and bath and spend 5 minutes freshening up. You want a picture of loveliness to your beloved when he comes in the door. Now, put on a fresh apron and start the supper work while the children do the room straightening and cleaning. Assign each person a room to straighten and clean. If you have no big children yet, you will need to do it. Bring your children along with you to do these chores. This is training for them. They might be a hindrance now, but in this training they are learning the work and will be soon training their younger brothers and sisters how to do it. Make a list of daily chores for each room and laminate it or put it in a sleeve protector to be kept in that room. As you go to each room, refer to the chart; show it to the children so that they will know that there is a list of work for the room. Take a photo of the room when it is picture perfect so that the children know what the room should look like when they are done and attach the photo to the Daily Chore sheet. At a certain time say “Afternoon Choretime! Let’s pick up and clean before Daddy gets home!” Children love to please their dad. If you keep them focused with encouraging words and do the work quickly they will grow to love the satisfaction of looking at a pleasing room and showing it off to Dad when he walks in the door. Don’t be a drill sergeant, be an encourager. Say things like you would want to hear it from your mom. Sing while you work, make up a silly song to go along with the work. Work quickly and efficiently. Pull a basket or wagon around to collect toys with and send the children on little missions to put the toys away. Give a trash bag to a child and send him around to be the trash collector. Hand out feather dusters and/or dust cloths and teach them to dust. By quickly dusting every day, the rooms do not get dirty. When things are picked up on a regular basis, there is not so much to put away. Take a step back for a minute here and do this during the day. Tteach them to put things away when they get them out! When they are done playing with something train them to put it away before getting out a new toy or activity. This works if you are with them and remembering to teach them every minute. It is when you become busy with another thing in another room that they will drop what they are doing and move on. Work on making “Don’t lay it down, put it away” one of your mantras. “An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.” If you have big children that can work well at room cleaning then have them work alone or with a little buddy. Assign them to teach a little child how to clean their assigned room. Teach the big buddy to be an encouraging teacher. If there is a need for speed, then set the little ones at the table with an activity that will keep them busy during the clean up time. There are some children and some ages of little ones that are simply more distracting to the assigned room cleaner than necessary. For instance, toddlers seem to delight in following a room cleaner around and undoing what was just done and cause the room cleaner to be working in a never-ending cycle. ARGH! Put these children at an activity at the table or in a high chair. Assign a day of the week for each toddler activity to be done while the rest of the crew cleans. i.e. Monday-playdough; Tuesday-washing dishes (water play); Wednesday-chunky puzzles; Thursday-coloring; Friday-finger paint. Not all of these will work for all children and situations, come up with your own list of activities for that particular child who is not able to clean or be a good little helper-buddy yet. Have the children choose their favorite room to be the one they are responsible for cleaning. This adds ownership to it for them because they care more about what their favorite room looks like. If there is disagreement about who gets what room then have the children draw straws. Keep the same rooms for a long stretch of time (3-4 months) so that the children will get really good at that room’s particular chores. This teaches them to do their work with excellence. By changing room assignments frequently, nobody gets really good and fast at doing a particular room. It is easier to let tasks slide by for the next room-keeper to do next week. It also makes it easier for the home manager by having a short period of room chore training rather than re-training new room-keepers every week. When the daily Room Chores are done for the main rooms of the house, then the children are to do their daily Bedroom Chores. By focusing on one area of the bedroom, the work there gets done on a regular basis and the bedroom is never very dirty. When the bedroom chore is done, do the Deep Cleaning chore for the day. Sometimes it is a big chore, sometimes it’s miniscule. It all depends on the Focus Area of the house, the chore for the day, and how many helpers there are. If a chore doesn’t get done one day, it’s OK, you can get that chore done next time it comes around in the housecleaning schedule. Try hard to keep the deep cleaning chores small and daily and you won’t have embarrassing deep dirt and cobwebs hanging around. Now, if the house is clean and Dad is not home yet, have the children do "Sit Time." Assign them a chair and give them a stack of books to “look” at. If they can read, then give them some reading time. The big kids could play a game that is easy to set up and tear down before supper like checkers or pick up sticks. If you eat dinner late and the children are starving, do a small snack time and clean up before "Sit Time." At our house, after the Afternoon Choretime, the big kids go outside to do their Animal Chores. Sometimes they are done by the time Dad comes home and sometimes they do outside chores with Dad. Each home is going to be a little different; the goal though is to have as much of the work done as possible before Dad comes home from work so that everyone can have a relaxing and pleasant evening enjoying each other. What time you start doing chores is also going to vary with your home, the ages of your children, how big of messes they make with their projects, what time your husband comes home from work, and more variables. If Afternoon Choretime is a new thing for your house, you will need to have a period of fine tuning to iron out these sorts of details. It takes time to learn new chores and new routines. Stick with it for a month and then work on making it more efficient. When we do daily chores in every room of the house, the house always looks clean and is never more than 10 minutes from looking picture perfect. If we skip Afternoon Choretime for a couple of days or a week then our house looks like a pig pen. Holding a regular chore time maintains your house beautifully. Having a system for doing the regular maintenance chores helps the house seemingly run by its self. It becomes consistently clean. Tip: In the past we use the unfinished part of the basement for these types of things before we turned it into a Laundry Room. Think creatively for making room for the creative projects. In our case, it was more efficient to move the girls into one room for sleeping. Sleeping is all their bedroom is used for anyway. Their toys are in the playroom and their craft projects are in the Sewing Room. Their clothes are in the bedroom closet. The Sewing Room is our place for all crafting endeavors. This is a bit of a jump from our culture’s idea of the use of rooms. Take a look at a house plan book, in the home decorating magazines and catalogs, watch a home decorating show, visit a 2.3 children family’s home and you will see bedrooms specially decorated for a boy or girl. Great expense and detail is given only to be outgrown in three years. With all the “proper” furniture and décor there is only room for one or at the most two children. What is the bedroom used for? Being an individual with a personal TV, stereo, and computer? Hanging out with friends? This doesn’t fit the philosophy of the Christian family of each one living for the other and all living for Christ. How many houses are large enough for each person in the large family to have their own bedroom and live that individualistic life? As Christians do we want to promote that kind of narcissism in our children? It is far better to promote the skills of loving and taking care of one another, of working creatively with our hands and hearts to benefit others. By narrowing the use of bedrooms for sleeping or reading quietly on a bed, this is accomplished. Use any extra room created in the home for a workspace. This keeps craft mess from spreading around through the house. If your house is small, work hard at thinking creatively, try different avenues and uses. What about “alone time”? What is the alone time used for? Think about the child that is seeking alone time. Is it a need for quiet reading or study? Is it a self-centered escape? If the child needs alone time to calm their spirit in a healthy way then help that child carve out a niche somewhere to have that quiet time. It doesn’t need to be a bedroom. It can be workshop, a reading chair, or a bubble bath. Let go of the culture’s idea of how things should be. Make a list of priorities. Do what you can with what you’ve got.
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