As part of this weekend's nesting mania, I redid our chore chart for the summer, thinking about some of the wisdom in Katherine's post here and the way life with our new baby will play itself out. I am blessed this time around to have helpers lined up a few days a week for the summer. And they are helpers who are fully capable of directing my children to complete their assigned tasks as well as taking on a few of my jobs themselves. I am grateful for that. Nonetheless, life with a newborn will inevitably bring its share of "survival mode" days. The chore chart is ready to go, printed and posted. But my thoughts the last few days have been less about the days where we'll get it all done and more about the days where we'll just make it through. Life in a lrge family provides plenty of these days--early in pregnancies, the first months with a new born, days nursing sick kids, and weeks loaded with outside commitments. How can we survive those days without frustration and without letting go of all the habits we work so hard to form when we are clicking along through rhythmic, orderly days?
Here are the rules I have come up with for survival mode.
Rule 1: Put the laundry on a schedule. Elizabeth and I share a theory that "as the laundry goes, so goes the house." In survival mode, the laundry is one of those things that is likely to fall woefully behind without a plan. I try to keep a daily laundry routine in mind as we move through our week so that everything that needs to be laundered gets its due attention. Making a weekly laundry schedule and committing to memory will be a huge help in survival mode. The morning duty of sorting can be simplified by directing a child to go to the hampers and grab all of whatever item is up that day. Folding and putting away is simplified by having one type of laundry in the basket. And if you have a helper asking what she can do, you have a ready answer: " Could you wash a load of....?" And when the day comes that no one touches the washer and dryer, you can count backwards and know exactly what you need to do to play catch up. That eliminates the "this is all so overwhelming I just can't think about it right now" syndrome. Here's what a week worth's of laundry looks like at our house:
- Monday: bed linens
- Tuesday: whites and light colored clothing, diapers
- Wednesday: bath and kitchen linens
- Thursday: dark and brightly colored clothing, ironing
- Friday: bath and kitchen linens, diapers
- Saturday: special care items, ironing
- Sunday: diapers, mending
I'll simplify for a few weeks after baby by using disposable diapers and skipping ironing and mending as needed. Normally on a Monday, we'd not only wash sheets, but air out comforters in the sun for a few hours. In baby mode, we'll settle for a quick spritzing with some lovely smelling linen spray I recently ordered along with my beeswax furniture polish.
Rule Two: Keep the kitchen sink empty. Try to be aware (or better yet, assign a child to be aware) of the next step in the dish cycle at all times. Then when an offer of help presents itself, or you need to send a child off to do something productive, or you happen to have a quick five minutes, you know what to do. I love the advice for homemaking to "do the next thing", except that when you're functioning in a sleep-deprived fog you often can't wrap your brain around what the next thing is. If you can walk into the kitchen and assess quickly the next step in the dish cycle, you can actually make a big impact in a short time.
Rule Three: Stick to the Morning Swish and Swipe. Keep some of those handy cleaning wipes near the bathroom sinks, a bottle of all purpose cleaner near the toilets, and some of that daily tub spray near the shower or tub. Each morning get someone to wipe out the sink, swipe the brush through the toilet, and spray down the tub in each of the bathrooms in the house. They'll still need a good scrubbing when life allows, but they'll stay fresh smelling and cleaner than filthy until you get to it.
Rule Four: Work the quick pick-up system. Put a system in place for tidying up quickly and easily. In our house, it'll be the laundry basket system. I'll put a laundry basket in the corner of each room, labeled for that room. Each evening, the kids can head to assigned rooms and pick up everything lying around and toss it into the basket. On a good day, the pick-up process can be: Gather dirty dishes and place in sink, throw away all trash, place all dirty clothes in a hamper, place the rest in the basket. On a bad day, dump it all the basket. On a good day, the pick up can be followed by a quick sweeping or vacuuming of the floor underneath, on bad day, not so much. In the morning, the kids bring all the baskets to whereever mom finds herself with, and the items inside are sorted into the basket for the room where they belong. The kids then take the baskets to the rooms and empty them. If they don't know where an item goes, they leave it in the basket. Mom can quickly put away on her next sweep through that room, dad can do it in the evening, or it can sit in the basket until the next morning when Mom can tell the child where to put it.
Rule 5: The rest is the rest. The last rule in survival mode is to realize all the rest of the things you would normally accomplish--dusting, mopping, scrubbing tubs--is the rest. It will get done, eventually. Dad will pick up the slack sometimes, days of miraculous cooperation from kids will appear unexpectedly, and angelic helpers in the form of friends will sweep through occasionally. And then, soon enough, you'll wake up one morning with the energy to tackle more than just the basics, and get to work. Until then, let the rest be the rest.
And I give you all permission to remind me of these words when I am feeling totally overwhelmed about a month from now.