Taking Back Bedrooms
Posted by Danielle Bean in Homemaking on Wednesday, August 06, 2008 3:09 PM
I sometimes walk into my kids’ bedrooms and wonder at the messes I find in there.
“How did it get so bad in here?” I’ll ask aloud.
The kids usually just shrug. No one sets out to make a mess. It just kind of happens. Bit by bit.
When I wrote about kids and their messes in the May/June issue of Faith & Family magazine, I heard from some moms who said, “Yes! That’s me! Now tell me how I can either 1) make peace with the mess or 2) control it without losing my mind?”
While I don’t have magic answers, I can share something that works for me. Most of us are all too familiar with the power of “bit by bit” when it comes to making messes, but do you realize that “bit by bit” works for controlling messes too? Do you take advantage of this?
If I only attend to kids’ bedrooms (or have them do it) once a week, by the time we get to it, cleaning up is an awfully big chore. I have been making efforts recently, though, to make tidying bedrooms—bit by bit—a daily, but much smaller chore around here.
I assign the job of bedroom maintenance to at least one child at least once per day. And then (here’s the part that’s new for me) I follow up and make sure they did a decent job. I know, it’s a pain, but it works. And truth be told, it takes only a few minutes to walk through the kids’ rooms and play areas (with a garbage bag in one hand and a laundry basket in the other) at the end of the day.
We still do a weekly, deeper cleaning, but the daily clutter is generally controlled this way. It’s a very nice feeling to tuck my kids in their beds in at least somewhat tidy bedrooms at the end of each day.
So now you enlighten us. What’s your strategy for keeping up with bedroom messes?
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