Mommy On Purpose

So your next step once you’ve made up your mind to try to be cleaner and worked a few minutes into each day for at least the bare minimum, it’s time to start a weekly cleaning routine. Again, it’s prioritized based on my life, schedule, and cleaning needs:

Now I’ve prioritized it this way because I HATE laundry, and would probably use any excuse I could think of to put it off for weeks at a time. So I force myself to do it on Monday; this way, if I have ironing or multiple loads that take me an extra day or two to get through, at least the laundry is done. Plus I get it done while I’ve got energy and motivation built up from a Sunday of rest.

Never gotten this desperate, but I do quite frequently end up wearing maternity clothes because nothing else is clean.

So here are my tips for a successful week of cleaning:

• Spread out your cleaning efforts among as many daily sessions as your schedule permits. If you’re a lucky stay-home mom like me, you can get by with as little as 5-20 minutes per day, Monday thru Saturday. If some days are harder than others, split up cleaning sessions among your less-exhausting days and spend 30-45 mins at a time. The point is to plan ahead, make a schedule that works for you, and gradually work on sticking to it.
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  Mountains of laundry? Tackle it first.

  Start the week off with whatever is the very most important in your house. If you have pets, that might be vacuuming. If you have small children, maybe mopping. Either way, you start out the week with your biggest hurdle out of the way. So if you run into a wall Tuesday night and can’t bring yourself to clean at all the rest of the week, at least that one thing is out of the way.

• Save things that don’t necessarily need to be done every week for Friday or Saturday.
• Don’t forget things that really only get done on an as-needed basis. I actually schedule them in on top of chores already getting done weekly, just to remind myself to check to see if something needs to get done. These chores include filing, dusting, watering plants, stuff like that that doesn’t need to be done weekly in my house, but gets neglected if it’s not on the schedule.
• Another fantastic tip from Rachelle Wilkinson: Laundry is much less of a headache if you worry less about separating by color and more about separating by person. To paraphrase Rachelle’s words, in this day and age of color-fastness, there’s no need to separate colors and whites, etc. Instead, just dump an entire hamper into the washer and make that person fold their own clothes once they’re dry. I did get burned ONCE using this technique, I threw a cheap red top from Charlotte Russe in with my husband’s and my load of laundry, and all of our white underwear turned pink. Oopsie. So use caution when washing the really cheap stuff.
• By “surfaces,” I mean dusting, cleaning any glass, and polishing any wood or leather as needed. Really only dusting and glass needs to get done every week in my house.
• Use your “catch-up” day to do an honest assessment of what needs to be done most. In the beginning, this was usually a whole week’s worth of cleaning for me. Now, it’s usually some kind of a quarterly or yearly chore I’ve been dreading for months. Still keep your cleaning session down to 20-30 mins… if you can. Be warned, though, cleaning can be addictive once you get the hang of it.

Stay tuned for those dreaded yearly and quarterly chores…

That’s short for Mommy On Purpose, by the way.

I’ve made quite a few attempts at blogging during my adult life, some of them successful, others not. My favorite was “How to Date a Difficult Woman,” which I think a couple people actually read once in a while. But then I got married and my dating habits became much less bloggable.

So why blog now? Because I’ve found that spending most of my time doing mindless, repetitive things either gives rise to a cranium full of useful thoughts that have nowhere to go, or to mindless boredom and frustration. So I’m going to empty my cranium here and throw my two bits out into the arena of mommyness.

Today while I picked up a bazillion wooden blocks, I tried to decide on my categories. I really ought to pick a niche, but not knowing what I’m good at blogging at yet, I’ll probably pick badly the first few times. So until I figure it out, here’s what I want to try…

Live to Eat. I love to cook, but even more, I love to eat. So this column seems only natural. Here’s where I’ll put recipes and other culinary discoveries.

Fight the Frump. Motherhood does atrocious things to your self image. New time and budget constraints limit our choices considerably, not to mention the sudden baby weight and the “please don’t let me turn into my mother” identity crisis. Most of us never take the time to really reconsider our style within the parameters of our changing bodies and lifestyles. We either continue to cram our new mommy selves into our good-old-days wardrobe, or we give up entirely and live in t-shirts and sneakers until it’s time to start shopping at Christopher & Banks. Either way, we come out looking like mommies and they start writing SNL skits about us. So I’m trying to beat the frump without going overboard. After all, we still have much more important things to worry about.

Just Clean Enough. My last year’s new year resolution was to become a clean freak. I used to be the most slovenly slob you’ve ever met (until you met my husband) but luckily, 2009 turned me into a born-again cleaner and organizer. Now, my house is still pretty messy, but I’m on a cleaning routine that works for me and gets the most important stuff done. I really want to get my strategies out there and report my continuing progress, because I could really have used some help and inspiration along the way. Hopefully I’ll help a fellow slovenly slob on her way to peace of mind, if not uber-clean freak status.

Parenting on Purpose. My go-to parenting guru is, far and away, the Baby Whisperer. Tracy Hogg was a genius, the ultimate Mindful Mommy. She coined the phrase “accidental parenting,” and I see a lot of it both in and out of my own home. I fight every day to avoid it, so I’ll share my goals and experiences here.

Products I Swear By. I think the best way to reward a good business for creating a good product is to buy that product and encourage others to do so. I think advertising is evil, creating demand to meet the supply… bloggers have more influence than they realize when the speak out, so here’s me casting my vote for the good stuff!

Products I Swear At. Same principle, opposite objective.

Time Savers. If there’s anything I really am good at, it’s organizing and streamlining. With help and inspiration from some of my OCD muses, I’m going to share strategies here.

… and that’s all I can think of for now.