Thanks for joining me. In today's episode, I'm going to
talk you through getting started on your housework, and I'm also
going to talk about the importance of having structure
in your day and how it can help you create an effective morning
routine. I'm Ronnie and you're listening
to Clean With Me, the podcast where I walk you through
cleaning your house step by step.
When you clean along with this show, you'll get more done in
less time so you can spend the rest of your day doing what
matters most to you. It's time to gear up for our
cleaning session. The first thing I want you to do
is get presentable. Maybe you're not dressed for the
day yet, or maybe you just need to slip some shoes on.
Or maybe you need to run a brush through your hair with the help
of a spray bottle to get rid of that bed head.
Maybe you like to put your hair up, or maybe you wear it down.
That's where the spray bottle can come in.
Actually, the spray bottle can help.
Either way. When I put my hair in a
ponytail, I often use a a spray bottle for that.
And when I say spray bottle, I'm usually talking about a leave in
conditioner of some sort. But I've also been known to just
use plain water or refill that conditioning spray bottle with
water. But I want you to do whatever
helps you feel presentable. This could mean washing your
face and putting on some moisturizer, or it could mean
going a few steps further and adding some makeup.
For me, mascara is a must. Some type of lip balm is a must
and lately I like to mix a tinted sunscreen like a tinted
minerals sunscreen in with my daily moisturizing cream.
It's kind of my summer look. I'm not typically putting on
actual foundation more than like once a week or something.
If the sound quality is slightly different, please forgive me.
Most episodes are not like this. I'm not in my desk with my
professional mic right now. I'm recording out in the car
because I have a house full today.
But lately my morning routine has been so crucial that I
wanted to talk about it. Sometimes in the summer, those
who are stay at home moms with kids or maybe people who work
part time or work from home. Just if you have kids and
getting them to school provides some kind of structure for you,
there could be a tendency to kind of drop the ball and be a
little bit disorganized. And obviously the summer is a
time to do things differently and enjoy the freedom that you
know your life not revolving around the school year can
provide. But that having been said, you
still need some kind of structure in your day.
My mom used to always have us do a certain list of chores before
swimming. Like we had some chores we had
to do in the morning, then we'd have lunch, then we'd wait the
30 minutes. Remember when they used to tell
you that wait 30 minutes before swimming?
I mean, it's probably still a good idea if you're doing some
kind of intensive swimming in deep water where you could like
freeze up and drown or something.
But like I think we had to wait there, but I mean we had to wait
30 minutes before going out to our 4 foot above ground pool as
school aged kids. But my point is that was the
structure that she created in the summer, even though she
could kind of sleep in, let us get our own cereal and watch
cartoons, we had to do certain housework before lunch.
And then we got to look forward to swimming, whether it was in
our own yard or we were going to a public pool that day.
And often times we had swimming lessons for a couple weeks
during the summer, and that also kind of gave us a deadline for
getting our chores done. The swimming lessons were
typically late morning. So we'd do our chores, we'd go
to swimming lessons, and then we'd come home and have lunch
and then we could play the rest of the day.
And we did not have a lot of chores, but whatever she wanted
us to get done, she would use the swimming as an incentive.
Hopefully by now you've done whatever you needed to do to
gear up for your cleaning session.
You're looking presentable, or you started some laundry, or
ideally both. The next thing I want you to do
is gather up any dishes from around the house and get those
to the sink. And then once you've done that,
straighten up your immediate front entrance.
If your front entryway and living room are one of the one
in the same, you might want to even pick up the living room.
OK, remove any clutter from the floor.
Straighten those couch cushions or just, you know, clean up your
foyer entryway area as well as getting all of the dishes to the
kitchen because of course we're going to do dishes.
That's an important part of your morning routine.
Unless you are doing your evening routine late, as far as
out, you know, the kitchen's closed, you're closing the
kitchen, you're getting down to dish 0.
But sometimes there can be a tendency for dishes to
accumulate in the evening even after you clean up the dinner
mess. OK, so whether you cleaned up
your dinner mess and then other dishes happened or you didn't
even clean up the dinner mess, sometimes dealing with those
dishes is an important part of your morning routine.
And of course, the first step is getting them to the kitchen.
And then having this, the front entrance presentable can make
you feel ready for somebody coming to the door or someone in
your family coming home. But while you're doing that,
I'll just talk about some things that have helped create
structure for me over the years. When we first moved to this
town, I did not know anyone here and I was a stay at home mom.
I hadn't even started this podcast yet.
So I did a little bit of writing, but I wasn't really in
writing mode per SE. So I was kind of just a full
blown stay at home mom when we first got here, and not to this
house, but to this town. And one way that I kind of
motivated myself each day is I would get dressed for the day,
get in my car. My kids were old enough to stay
home alone. I would get in the car and drive
through Sonic and get myself an iced coffee with chocolate.
They don't call it an iced mocha there.
It's an iced coffee and then you have chocolate added to it or
whatever. But it was basically an ice
mocha. I would get that and it was 32
oz. I don't know how many calories
it had. Unfortunately it caused me to
gain weight so I could have picked a lower calorie option to
start my day. And I still drink sweet coffee
every morning. But this was too big of a
container. It was like 32 oz, or maybe it
was 40. I don't know.
It was big, so I'm not really condoning the size of my
breakfast drink, but it was helpful for me to get ready for
the day and then go out for coffee instead of making it at
home. And now I normally make my
coffee at home. I've got cold brew in the
fridge. I've got a Keurig.
So I have all these options for making coffee at home and it's
typically what I do. But during that era, I just
needed to get up and ready and get out of the house.
Also, I was homeschooling at that time, so I didn't have the
school commute. It was, you know, always kind of
like summer in that I could start my day whenever I wanted
to and it just didn't have as much structure because typically
when you're, you're homeschooling, you do have a
start time, but it's not as early.
You're not getting your kids up as early as you would if they
needed to get ready, pack a lunch and all the things like
you're starting a little later when you don't have all that
other stuff to do. So that was how I injected
structure into my day, by getting fixed up, getting that
caffeine, and then I'd come back and do my housework and get my
kids up and start their day. At other times in my life,
getting up and getting the kids ready for school and dropping
them off provided the necessary structure because then when I
got back, I was already dressed for the day, fixed up and ready
to tackle my housework. And then of course, working
outside the home is another way that my day was structured.
I've worked full time off and on and I've also talked about the
fact that working part time is best for me.
I do like to get out of the house and do some work, but I
also like being a homemaker and working part time is the best
balance for me. And I used to have a job where I
would work in the morning, I think it was like 9 to one or
something. And it was just the ideal
schedule for me because I got fixed up, dressed to the shoes,
and then I got home and still had a lot of energy because I'd
only worked a half shift basically.
And I'm not saying if you're a full time stay at home mom that
you need to get a part job, part time job.
I'm not saying that at all. I'm just saying that's kind of
what works for me. But during times when I was a
full time homemaker, I had to find other ways to inject
structure into my day. Right now all I'm doing is the
podcast and college classes because as you know, I work at a
school and we're out for the summer.
So something that has provided me with structure so far this
summer is getting up and making my son's lunch.
My oldest son is staying with us right now and he works somewhere
where he can't like buy a lunch. So I've been making in burritos
in the morning and that causes me to kind of detail my kitchen.
It's a time when I can put away my clean dishes and wash any
dishes that were left from the night before and it it just gets
me up and going. Another possible way to inject
some structure into your day is putting your kids in some kind
of swimming lessons or day camp. This week my youngest son is in
firefighter training. He also has soccer practice on
Monday and Friday evenings, but that's later on, so it doesn't
really help with the morning routine.
So I got started even earlier today because he has the
firefighter training, but even before that started and long
after it ends, I'm going to be up making my other son's lunch
in the morning. It's time to get started on your
dishes, whatever that means for you, if you haven't already done
so again, you might have had some dishes from the night
before, Now's the time to do those.
If you don't have dirty dishes from the night before, now's a
great time to empty your drying rack or empty your dishwasher.
And of course, it's always a good time to wipe down the
surfaces in your kitchen. But I want you to spend a few
minutes getting down to dish 0, wiping down your surfaces, and
then sweeping or vacuuming the kitchen if needed.
If that's not needed, of course, you can just do kind of a whole
house pickup starting with throwing away trash and then
dealing with whatever other clutter is around.
But while you're working on dishes or surfaces or picking
up. I just wanted to say that I, I
just got a new toy, so to speak, and it's the shark lift away
navigator. Basically, I just went into
Walmart and I got the most expensive Shark that they had,
but I googled like what's the best one on dry floor, you know,
hard floors or whatever and got that.
And then my husband and I were talking and I was like, I don't
think I'm going to use this all over the house, even though you
can put it on different settings.
I'm going to keep using my existing vacuum on the carpet
and I'm just going to use this one in the kitchen because I
don't want it to wear out or whatever.
I want it to last as long as possible.
And I told him I just hate sweeping.
And this is probably the third house that I've had that had a
huge kitchen. No, I don't have a huge house,
but I'm talking about a lot of the house. 3 of the houses that
I've lived in, including this one, had huge eat in kitchens
where just a lot of the square footage is in the kitchen.
Sweeping might not be a big deal if you just have some small
U-shaped kitchen. In fact, in one house we lived
in, the house was 1900 square feet, but the kitchen was
similar to an apartment kitchen in size, and that was nice.
When it was time to sweep, sweeping wasn't a big deal, but
there was a challenge as far as storage because we didn't have
much cabinet space and I had to get like a different container
to put things in. But if you've got a huge kitchen
like me and you despise sweeping, I definitely recommend
investing in a quality vacuum that's good on hard floors.
I'm talking something that can suck up cat litter, Cheerios,
whatever. OK.
And no, our litter box isn't in the kitchen per SE, but it's in
like the opposite corner. It's in that tiled area, but
it's in the opposite corner, like past where my dining room
table is. And so I wanted to make sure
that whatever I got would vacuum up any cat litter that happens
to get kicked up onto the tile. And of course, Cheerios are just
an example of something that's not super tiny.
But in reality, my dogs will eat any Cheerios typically that end
up on the floor. If you're wondering why I have
Cheerios on the floor sometimes, I have grandkids and they're
toddlers. Most of you are probably
plugging away at dishes. But if you don't have any dishes
to wash or put away, obviously be wiping down your countertops
and sweeping or vacuuming the kitchen.
And if that doesn't need to be done or you get it done super
fast, the next step is to go through your whole house picking
up. By the way, special thanks to my
financial supporters who support this show either on Patreon or
Apple Podcasts or some other way.
When you subscribe to bonus content, you unlock longer
episodes. Not every episode is longer, but
in general, the bonus episodes tend to be longer and you're not
really on the full program until you subscribe to bonus content.
But I understand not everybody's able to subscribe and just
listening helps me, but I wanted to give myself a little plug
there. This is going to be a short
episode. Most of the free ones are, but
one of the reasons it's so short is I do have company right now
and I want to spend quality time with my granddaughters before
they go home. Jessica's in town with the
girls, but I've really been keeping on top of my housework,
especially the kitchen. So I just wanted to share with
you that having something that you do in the morning that gets
you to start your day at a certain time is kind of
important. And your summers could be a
little bit laid back, but you still need to get started early
in the day and set yourself up for a successful day.
So hopefully I've helped you think about your summer routine
and if you work from home or you work outside the home and
basically you go to work every morning, even in the summer, you
definitely want to have a few things that you do before work.
Obviously you need to get fixed up, maybe pack a lunch, but try
to have a couple things that you do for your house.
Because when you do things for your house, you're doing things
for yourself. You're improving your quality of
life by improving your surroundings.
OK, but some of us need a little more structure to make sure that
we're consistently doing certain things early in the morning.
And I also wanted to give you permission to get some type of
vacuum for your kitchen floor. If you're one of the huge
kitchen girlies like me and you have a large expanse of flooring
and you despise sweeping with a broom, obviously you'll still
use the broom in certain situations.
You know, you break a jar, you're sweeping up glass or
something. Yes, of course.
But I'm saying I don't like to have to just sweep every
particle of dust from my kitchen floor.
And for you, it might be something else in your housework
that you don't like doing, and it might make sense for you to
buy some kind of gadget or tool to make that easier.
Or maybe delegate it to someone in the family who doesn't
despise it as much as you do. I mean, it's summer.
You could hire a teenager to come over and do certain aspects
of your housework if you can afford it.
I haven't done that per SE, but I used to pay Jessica to clean
my house when she was a teenager.
And off and on over the years, different teenagers have
approached me. Mom, is there a way I could earn
extra money? Boys, girls, doesn't matter.
Everybody should be doing housework and every kid should
learn how to do all, all aspects of housework at some point.
Even if you know you're doing a thing where your boys take out
the trash and they mow the lawn and things like that, that
should not be all you teach them, OK?
My husband grew up doing dishes. He knew how to cook and he knows
how to clean the bathroom and all the things.
And we teach our boys to do all of that because it it's not.
That's not gender specific. Housework is not gender specific
and being a stay at home mom does not mean that the housework
all falls to you. OK, obviously every situation is
different, every marriage is different.
But if you have school aged kids, they need to be learning
how to do household chores. A lot of times I give them the
chores that they like more. But they've all done dishes,
they've all cleaned a bathroom. I don't think my 13 year old son
has been trained on deep cleaning a bathroom yet, but he
will be. Anyway, whether you're a parent
or not, hopefully I've given you some ideas for adding some
structure into your day over the summer or just in life.
I hope you got a lot done during this episode.
Happy cleaning. I hope you're having a wonderful
summer and I'll talk to you again soon.