Getting It Clean?
Posted by Arwen Mosher in Family on Thursday, February 24, 2011 10:41 PM
Since my husband and I became parents, our evening routine has gone like this: put the kid(s) to bed, tackle tidying the house, then finally - when things are back in order - relax until it’s time for bed.
There have been a handful of nights when we’ve skipped the tidying, but we’ve always regretted it. It helps immensely to start the next day with a living room that is cleared of toys, with a kitchen that has a dishwasher full of clean dishes instead of a sink full of dirty ones.
(I say a silent prayer of thanksgiving for the dishwasher almost every day.)
The amount of after-bed tidying varies depending on what kind of day it has been, but there is always some to do. Unless we’re really tired, Bryan and I usually don’t mind doing it. We think it’s worth it, and it’s something we can tackle together, and it’s not a big deal.
But now that our children are four and two and we’ve got the birth of two new babies on the horizon, I’m starting to wonder about this part of the routine. We’ve been doing it for years - since Camilla was a baby - and we’ve kept it up because we’re used to it. But since our kids are getting older, is it time for a change?
During the day, I’m pretty good about making sure Camilla and Blaise clean up after themselves, not letting them go on to the next game until they’ve taken care of the mess from the last one. Unfortunately, this discipline falls apart after dinner. Bryan and I are focused on dinner clean-up and starting bedtime routine, and any clutter from after-dinner play sits there until we start tidying after the kids are asleep.
(I think they must have caught on to this, since after-dinner play always seems to be more involved and messier than the stuff they do during the afternoon.)
Honestly, I think one of the hidden incentives here is that it’s easier for us parents to do the clean-up ourselves than to make the kids do it. We can spend forty-five minutes herding them through putting toys away before bedtime… or we can spend ten minutes later doing it ourselves. We often opt for the easy route.
But I’m thinking: in the long run, this probably isn’t so good for the kids. They need to learn that responsibility doesn’t stop after 6pm! So I’m looking for ways to help make tidying the house in the evening, at the very least, a whole-family job. And it still needs to fit into the half-hour between the end of dinner clean-up and the beginning of bedtime routine.
Parents, do you have any tips? I’d love to hear about how you make evenings work in your house. Have you come up with any sort of organized system? Has a more relaxed approach worked for you? Even if you have older kids, I’d like to hear your ideas, so I can store them away for later!
Please share!
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