Thanks for joining me in this episode.
I'm going to talk you through a quick speed clean of your
bedroom, just a bedroom reset. We're going to get your bedding
washing and then we're going to quickly clean your room.
But I'm also going to be answering a listener question
about getting everything done in the course of a day when you
have kids and cleaning your room.
This could be any bedroom. It could be your bedroom, or it
could be a kid room or even an office or craft room.
Just a room in your house that would be advertised as a bedroom
if your house were up for sale. So just a general bedroom speed
clean. I'm going to talk you through
the steps and I want you to try to keep up, you know, challenge
yourself to get your room clean during this short time.
I'm here to talk you through it and I'm also going to be giving
you some of my best time management tips from both of my
home schooling eras, which I'm no longer in.
It's time to gear up for your cleaning session.
Maybe you need to grab a trash bag if you don't have a
wastebasket in your room. Or maybe you want to just grab
your kitchen wastebasket and bring it in there.
You're going to need a place to quickly throw away trash while
you're cleaning the room. Another thing you're going to
want to do is think about where you're going to put any
donatables. This isn't about decluttering
your wardrobe or purging your belongings.
I have other episodes that cover that and I plan to make another
one soon. But still, you might come across
something where you're like, OK, every time I try on this outfit,
I don't like it. So it needs to go in the
donation pile. So maybe you have a donation
station in the back of your closet, or maybe you want to
grab a bag or a box for those types of items in case you come
across them. Cleaning supplies.
You're going to need some kind of a dusting spray and also a
glass cleaner, maybe a couple microfiber clothes, whatever you
have on hand for wiping surfaces in your room, both glass and non
glass. Or maybe you use one single
product. There's there's a pledge multi
purpose spray that works for glass and wooden furniture.
And you're going to vacuum or sweep after this episode,
perhaps while listening to music or listening to a podcast about
another topic. But I'm going to get you through
the tedious parts of cleaning your row.
This is a speed clean, so I'm not going to beat around the
Bush here. I'm going to get you started
right away. I want you to strip your bed and
remake it with different bedding.
I'm pretty sure you have a complete other set of sheets,
even if you only have one comforter.
What I recommend is changing your bedding, putting on those
alternate sheets and pillowcases, and then grabbing a
random blanket or backup comforter and just making your
bed with that. It doesn't have to look perfect,
but having a maid bed will give you kind of an instant sense of
accomplishment. It will make even the messiest
room look a lot better instantly, and it's also going
to give you kind of a staging area to place things that you're
having trouble making decisions about and just help you get
things off of the floor during those early stages of cleaning
the room. OK, so again, I want you to get
your bedding washing and put some alternate bedding on your
bed. If you only have one set of
sheets, I do recommend purchasing another set.
I know times are hard, but that's one thing that's going to
make your life a lot easier. And sometimes things happen,
spills happen, you know, a kid pees on your bed.
And one of the reasons why I put an alternate blanket or
comforter on my bed instead of waiting for the first comforter
to dry is because lately I like to air dry my comforter.
I hang the comforter up over a room divider.
And if I didn't have that room divider, I would probably hang
it up over my glass shower doors.
I sometimes air dry items there. Anyway, hopefully you're making
your bed while I talk. While you do that, I'll just
read the the listener question that I'm going to be answering
in this episode. It says love the podcast.
I'm a financial supporter. I was wondering if you could do
an episode about trying to get everything done in a day with
small kids. Homeschooling, exercise,
housekeeping, and dinner. It feels like I don't have
enough hours in the day sometimes.
I'm going to do my best to answer this question.
I will preface it by saying that when number 5 was a baby, I put
numbers 1-2 and three in school because I was not able to keep
up with everything. With five kids in the house and
trying to homeschool, do my housework, and have dinner done
by the time my husband got home from work, it was a lot.
It ended up being too much so I ended up taking a year off from
home schooling where my 2 youngest at the time were home
with me, a preschool age child, and a baby after I dropped the
kids off at two different schools.
So anyway, the numbers one and two went on to graduate from
public school. I never brought them back home
again to home school once I put them in school.
But #3 didn't really like school at that time, and she asked to
be homeschooled the next year. So then I was doing a
combination of dropping teenagers off at school and then
homeschooling. This gradually evolved back into
me being a fully homeschooling parent once #2 graduated.
Don't tune me out if you're if you're not into homeschooling.
I think there's a lot of time management tips in this episode
that could apply to anyone, especially anyone with kids
because some of you have small children who aren't in school
yet. And whether you have others who
are in school or none of your kids are school aged, you're
still home with small children and so a lot of these tips will
apply. OK, now that your bedding has
changed, the next thing I want you to do is start picking up
your bedroom floor. I'm talking about putting shoes
in the closet, putting trash in the wastebasket or trash bag,
OK. And there are a couple ways you
could go about this. If you have hard floors, maybe
you like the method of sweeping everything into the middle of
the room, especially if this is a kid room with toys and other
debris. Even if it's a carpeted room,
you might want to just kind of pull everything out into the
middle of the room. Because if this is your time to
clean a kid room, maybe they've been stuffing things under the
bed. Or maybe you're cleaning an
adult room and you're like me and you've got a dog who drags
things under the bed and you have to pull that stuff out with
a broom. Somebody needs to write in and
tell me if they relate to that part because I feel like it's a
weird thing that I bring up on the show, but it's an issue.
I should tell you some of the other weird things about that
particular dog, but we'll save that for another show.
Maybe you want to pull everything out into the middle,
or maybe you want to just walk around the room kind of end to
end, corner to corner, just picking up whatever you come
across and putting it where it goes.
Or maybe you want to put things away by category.
You might be thinking, OK, I'm going to put all the shoes in
the closet. I'm going to put all The Dirty
clothes in the hamper. Or you might like more of a
geographical method where you just put away everything you
come across. If you're trying to get steps
in, the geographical method will have you walking around more
where you're just putting everything away as you work your
way around the room. You know, maybe you put a pair
of shoes away, you put something in the trash, you hang up a
sweater, and you're just doing all different things that can
maximize your steps. You might want to put things
away by category. The important thing is that
you're clearing your floor now you're going to come across some
items that you don't know what to do with.
Place those questionable items on the bed.
I'm talking about you pick something up.
You're not sure if it's clean or dirty or if you even want to
keep it at all or it it doesn't have a home.
Place that on your bed. But if you know what to do with
something, put it away. And I don't want you to get hung
up on thinking about your cluttered night stands, dresser,
desk. I want you to be focusing on
getting the floor cleared. It's going to give you an
amazing sense of accomplishment. The most egregious clutter is
the clutter that's on the floor. OK, you want to get your floor
cleared first. That's what I want you to be
working on right now. If you don't have a lot of
clutter on the floor, great. You can start folding some clean
laundry on your freshly made bed, or you can start
decluttering surfaces and cleaning them.
You know what that glass cleaner is for?
It's for washing the inside of a window.
Or maybe there's a sliding glass door.
But for a lot of you, picking up the floor is going to take a
minute. I just wanted to let you know
what the next step is in case you get ahead of me while I'm
talking about all these time management tips because I'm
trying to squeeze a lot of information into this episode.
So exercise during my first homeschooling era where nobody
was in school, my only exercise was child centered exercise.
Meaning I would put little ones in a stroller and all of us
would go for a walk. You know, some would be on foot
or on a bike, little ones would be in strollers.
We would go for a walk and we would often walk to a park in
our neighborhood and at that park there was a sidewalk that
went around the playground area. So sometimes I would just kind
of walk laps around that sidewalk while the kids were
playing in the playground in the center.
This isn't going to work with just one of these huge spread
out city parks where your kids are going to just take off out
in some other direction. What I'm talking about is maybe
a small playground in like your subdivision where and not
everybody's going to have this. I get it.
But I'm just describing the type of park that I find useful, you
know, when watching small kids and exercising at the same time.
But if there's a small playground and you can circle
around, they're like briskly walking or even jogging while
keeping a visual on your kids. That can be a great form of
exercise. And your kids are also wearing
themselves out if they're toddlers or preschoolers and
you're wanting them to take a nap later.
Or even if they're older kids and you just want them to blow
off some steam so that they'll be more mellow when you get back
to the house. But a time management tip that's
going to relate to everybody, even if they're not in a season
of life where they're caring for small children during the day.
Getting out of the house, even though this seems
counterintuitive when you have just housework piling up and
you're like, I need to stay home and focus on this housework.
Getting out of the house can make you more productive.
It gives you something to look forward to.
It gives you kind of a deadline and it it just injects some
structure into your day. For example, telling
homeschooled kids, if we get our first two subjects done by
12:00, we'll go to the park after lunch, you know, and then
you get back from the park and you put the youngest ones down
for a nap. Now, don't get me wrong with
homeschooling, not usually practical to have a super rigid
schedule. Like, OK, we're done with math
at nine O 5, but you should have an order of operations.
We do these subjects first, which are going to be those
important core subjects like reading, language arts, math.
You're going to do that stuff first in the beginning part of
the day when everybody's fresh and you know it's going to get
done and you're going to have an order in which you do things.
But you're going to have a goal of getting certain subjects done
by a certain time. You know, lunch and then play
time and then nap time. Or maybe your play time is going
to come a little before lunch because you want to do the naps
directly after lunch. I definitely had a routine.
Basically, I favor routines over schedules because with kids
you've got to be flexible. You know, with small children,
obviously if you're homeschooling only school age
children, your schedule can be as rigid as what they would have
in an actual school. But with these age gap families
where or just families where some of the kids aren't school
aged yet, you've got to have some flexibility built in, which
is why I favor a routine over a schedule where every hour you do
a certain thing. OK, but what I'm getting at is
the idea of going somewhere is going to punctuate your day.
And this could apply that to someone who's at home alone, but
you're still struggling to fit everything into your day just
because of procrastination, lack of self-discipline.
We all struggle with those issues in one way or another in
our lives. None of us are perfect, OK,
Telling yourself that you're going to maybe go for a walk and
call a friend while you're walking or meet with a friend
and walk with a friend, that that's even giving you more
accountability because someone's showing up waiting for you.
Telling yourself you need to get certain things done before that
can definitely help. Getting enough exercise can
energize you to where you're more productive around the
house. Now, we're going to talk a
little bit about bad weather, but I want you to, at this
point, move on to clearing and cleaning the surfaces of your
room. You may not have time to clean
interior windows and window sills and mirrors and things
like that, but you have the cleaning supplies there in case
you do. So I do want you to uncover
those surfaces, you know, clear off everything that doesn't
belong on your night stands, your dresser, other surfaces in
your room. OK, Make sure your room is
vacuum or sweep ready before you move from the floor to cleaning
the upper surfaces, OK? And I'm trying to kind of keep
you distracted while you do it. I feel like this show is a
balance I'm keeping you distracted from knowing your
cleaning, but also snapping you back to reality occasionally to
tell you when to move to the next step to make sure you are
still cleaning. Another time management tip for
someone in this listener's situation or anyone who's home
during the day. Think about dinner early,
ideally in the morning. Think about what you're going to
take. You know what you're going to
have for dinner, ideally the day, either the night before or
first thing in the morning because you might need to thaw
something out. OK, but know what you're making
for dinner by noon. I think I got into this habit
because my husband tended to text me in the middle of the day
and say what's for dinner. I don't know if he was wanting
to make sure that I made dinner or if he just wanted to kind of
get his taste buds ready and start anticipating dinner.
Maybe he just wanted something to look forward to and that was
the time of day he was starting to get hungry.
And, you know, maybe all he had was a little bag of chips or
something and he wanted to think about what I was making, but he
would ask me what was for dinner.
So that kind of got me in the habit of planning dinner early
because he'd ask me and then I kind of rushed to the kitchen,
figure it out and then tell him. But later that evolved into me
thinking about dinner on my own earlier in the day because, you
know, nobody wanted to get to the end of the day where they're
just pulling a frozen piece of meat out of the freezer.
And they're like, oh, I got to thaw this in the microwave.
And that's not really the ideal. I've always wanted to try
getting these like slabs that you put the food on and it
causes it to thaw out quicker. I don't know how well that
works, but I've, I've seen like infomercials on that.
But when you think about dinner, it doesn't necessarily mean
thawing something out. It could mean that you opened
your freezer and there was something in there that can go
directly from the freezer to the oven.
You know, maybe you look in your freezer and you're like, OK,
we're gonna have chicken Nuggets, tater tots and I'll
toss a salad to go with that or whatever.
Hopefully you're working on those bedroom surfaces, whether
it's windows and windowsills or night stands, dressers and so
on. The key to getting your house
really clean during these episodes is being observant and
doing what needs to be done. That's another tip I have for
those who are in a very busy season of life, going into each
room of your house and doing whatever needs to be done the
most. I think some of our household
struggles have to do with prioritizing.
Wrong. Some of my priorities during my
busiest seasons have been getting all the dishes done
within a 24 hour period, keeping up on at least washing and
drying the laundry even if people are sometimes living out
of a clean laundry pile, and making a home Nate homemade
dinner at night. And that might not be a priority
for you, but when my husband was working, he definitely preferred
a homemade meal to me saying like, oh, we're just going to
order pizzas tonight. It was probably that Acts of
Service was one of his love languages.
OK. But it was also a good idea for
us because cooking at home saves money especially when you have a
large family. After my #3 wanted went to
school that year and wanted to come home.
I later went on to home school my 4 youngest and not that they
were all homeschooling at at the same time, but eventually they
were when they all got to be school aged.
But having four in the house while homeschooling was going on
was my limit. So if you're homeschooling and
you have 5 or more kids at home, like you're not dropping any of
them off at a school, you've got five kids in the house.
Your spouse might not be happy with the amount of housework
you're getting done, or you might not be happy with it, or
you might be struggling to get in exercise because it's hard to
have kids all on the same schedule sometimes.
The other thing I was going to say about exercise that I didn't
really do, but it's something that I probably would have done
if I had it to do over again, is exercise videos.
Because it's something I do sometimes now and I think it
would have been a fun way to, you know, for those rainy days
to get in some exercise. I, I really tended to do these
like park outings and walks when the weather was nice.
Now, at some point during my second homeschooling area,
things got easier because I had a neighbor who was also
homeschooling a child who was close in age to my #3.
So it became an incentive. Like if you get your work done,
you can play with so and so. So, you know, maybe interact
with another family. I'm really big on incentives for
kids getting their work. And later that family and our
family both went into our ice skating era.
I put two of my kids in figure skating lessons, one in hockey
skating lessons, and I got a little backpack with a leash for
my 2 year old. I created these homework binder,
the I created these homeschool binders where I made our
workbooks and everything portable to where we would get
ready, go to the skating rink and the kids would be able to do
some of their schoolwork in the car and during some of the
downtime at the skating rink between classes and whatnot.
And well, you know, because different classes were at
different times for different kids and we ate lunch in the
restaurant there and it was just it was an era that was super
fun. And again, getting out of the
house made us all more productive.
It made the kids more productive with the schoolwork.
And it also made me speed up on my housework because I had to
kind of justify that that I was leaving to do this.
I will say that it wasn't expect.
It was pretty expensive hobby. I mean, at that point you could
almost put your kids in a private school with a sports
program, but it kind of breathed some life into our home
schooling. Also, I was getting to socialize
with this other mom. Yeah, don't get too isolated
when you're home schooling. You need a buddy where you could
do play dates or another way we had structure later on is when
we first got to this town, we did a homeschool PE at this
Community Center once a week. And so that was something to
kind of look forward to. I'm really big on exercise, I
guess. But at the same time, like I, I
was never on a formal exercise program until like around the
age of 42. OK, so let's talk about that.
At around age 42, I got into running and #2 was a teenager
who was in public school. I was home schooling and
watching younger ones at home. What I did is I started going
for a jog or a run and I started out with walking for a few days.
It evolved into jogging. I call it running, but it was a
very slow pace. OK, but I would go for a 20 or
30 minute run in the morning while my teenage son watched the
younger kids, you know, who are often still in bed.
And one of the reasons that I switched from walking to running
is that it's a lot harder to carve out the time for an hour
long walk than it is to go on a 20 or 30 minute run.
You know, as far as like calorie burn and cardio, whatever you're
going for. Now I'm into walking, but I have
the time to do it on a rainy day or cold day.
Could do some kind of exercise video that might even be child
centered. For example, sometimes the kids
in our school, in the school where I work, do these step
programs where everybody has this little wooden step and
they're doing it along with a video.
And one time I was subbing in there and I was doing the step
aerobics with them. And the video was geared toward
kids, but it was fun for me as an adult as well.
So something like that could help you wear your kids out.
Physical exercise is so important.
You know, there's a reason why kids have recess.
So get your kids out more, get your kids outside more, wear
them out even if it's inside the house, and have an enforced
quiet time during the little ones naps.
I will admit, sometimes I was just on the bed with my two
younger ones relaxing with a book or the computer or whatever
because they stayed asleep longer if I was right there with
them. But my older kids knew that they
needed to be quiet during that time.
There were school subjects that they were able to work on
independently during that time. And you know, it was just, it
was just a quiet time. But sometimes when you have a
kid that's like 3-4 and they don't necessarily go to sleep at
nap time, you can still have them lie down on a mat, maybe
with a book and just be quiet. Because if they were in a
daycare or an all day kindergarten, they would be
forced to lie down at a certain time of day and they would
gladly do it. So you can have them do that
too. It's just you've got to be
consistent. No, you don't have to go to
sleep, but you are going to lie down South.
Sanity tip for those with small children who just need a break,
whether it's to do some housework.
My mom always said involve the kids in housework.
I've said this in other episodes, but hand them a baby
wipe. Let them wipe some things down.
So yeah, walking with a stroller or finding a playground where
you can walk circles around it. Exercise videos.
Maybe going for a run when you do have someone at home to watch
the kids, whether it's your husband or someone else.
Thinking about dinner early in the day.
Later, during the end of my second homeschooling era and
even when I wasn't homeschooling anymore, just having an alarm at
3:30 PM start dinner. You know, worst case, if I
didn't think about dinner early in the day at 3:30, I'm going to
put some meat into a pot of hot water and get it thawing out by
3:30 in order to get dinner ready around 5530.
The crock pot can also be a solution if you have more time
in the morning where you can get up.
Don't be afraid to have two crock pots. 2 crock pots going.
I went through a phase where I was homeschooling and writing
from home and had two crock pots going because it was easier for
me to prep dinner in the morning then to do it after a long day
of writing on the computer. When I was mentally drained, it
kind of physically drained me. So you can do potatoes and corn
on the cob and one crock pot and meet in the other.
Another thing is I didn't allow toys in the living room.
I think having an area where you do the home schooling where your
little ones are playing with toys while the other kids are
doing their school work is the way to go.
But some of my main priorities were getting the dishes done
every 24 hours, keeping my entryway in front room
perpetually clean, and keeping toys in the bedrooms.
And of course when you're home all day you need to have like 3
resets. Morning, afternoon, evening, you
need to clean as you go. Have your kids clean up before
moving on to another activity. You might also want to take a
lot of their stuff out of circulation simply so they can't
spread toys all over the house. OK, especially if you have a
very low clutter threshold. Hopefully your bedrooms picked
up, your surfaces are clear, and you've wiped down those
surfaces. I hope you got a lot done during
this episode. Special special thanks to my
financial supporters who've already unlocked bonus episodes.
Hopefully, I've given you some tips for, you know, surviving
homeschooling or just parenting small kids or even just planning
your day. Maybe you don't even have kids,
but you need to get out of the house more, you know, meet with
a friend for exercise or, you know, do certain things before
you leave the house or set a timer to make dinner, especially
if that's something that makes your husband feel loved.
OK, Thank you so much for listening.
I appreciate each and every one of you.
And as always, happy cleaning. I'll talk to you the next
episode.