A Mom's Guide to Getting a Life

As a mom, I know personal time is a most precious thing. Finding the time for yourself after you take care of the husband, kids, pet and house is an almost impossible task. To find time, you need to first reevaluate how you are currently doing things and find better and more time saving ways to do it faster or better. This does not mean you have to turn your family's life upside down, but they will notice some changes and a more relaxed mom!

The first thing I did when I decided to make time for myself was streamline my home. Streamlining your home from clutter, dust, and general disorder makes keeping it easy to clean. It sounds like an impossible task but it's not.

To start go through each room and get rid of all the clutter. Pack or get rid of ½ the knick-knacks, pictures, sculptures and toys in your house. What I did was get rid of anything that DID NOT have a sentimental value or if my daughter had not played with it in six months. Why have stuff lying around collecting dust if they do not MEAN anything to you? I can't tell you how much time that saved in just general pick-up and dusting time.

The second thing I did to streamline the house was to get a clutter basket for every room. It can be anything to store things, a plastic container, a painted box, or a crate. Now the clutter basket gets cleaned out once a month, and the mom rule in my house is if the item is not out of the box in one month, it goes into one the out of the house boxes. One is for Charity (Giving things to charity is a great tax right off!) another box is for recycling and the third is the garbage can.

Now, this is hard because you have to be strong if a toy gets into the clutter box because your child didn't put it away. Remember, you MUST follow through on your threat to give it to charity no matter how much they yell, shout, or cry. Just tell them it would not have happened if they PUT their things away. It took only one month to train my daughter to put her things away. Now all I have to say is "Do you want it to go to charity?" and she gets to cleaning up right away.

I also set up a cleaning and grocery schedule and stuck to it. By letting everyone know when things are done, you do not have to do regular tasks repeatedly during the week. For example, laundry is done on Monday only, so if Matt wants his shirt for Saturday night he has two choices doing a load of laundry or not wearing that specific shirt.

Remember, this doesn't work if you break down and clean Matt's shirt for him. When he asks, suggest he do his own laundry if the Monday's washday does not coincided with his schedule! Better yet, if your child is ready to do laundry teach them how and give them their own laundry day!