Following Grandma's Traditions Can Be the Key to Housekeeping Success

For the stay-at-home moms among us who have a hard time staying on top of the housework, one of the main reasons we all point to is the endlessness of it all. As soon as we're caught up on laundry, there's more to do. As soon as we pick up the things the kids have strewn around the house, we turn around to see one of our darlings making a new trail of toys. It's so frustrating to have nothing ever get done that we often say "What's the use?" and give up.

We should take a bit of advice from our grandmothers (and great-grandmothers) and keep a housecleaning schedule.

Remember the old fashioned dishtowels that used to say things like Errands on Monday and Washing on Wednesday? Well, what we now see as kitschy little towels that we use to decorate our kitchens used to be the way grandma ran her's.

When she was newly married, Grandma took a look at her week, and all the things she needed to do. She considered which days Grandpa needed the car, which days the produce and meats were freshest at the market, which days she wanted to do the washing and general cleaning, and which day she had lunch with her friends. Then she decided on a schedule for the week. For every day of the week, she decided on the aspect of her work that she wanted to focus on.

By scheduling her week in this way, she not only had a framework that allowed her to get all of her major work accomplished, but she also could consider herself done with it for the rest of the week. This is the key to Grandma's success, and something that has been lost along the way.

Most of us who are stay-at-home moms now were raised by working moms who weren't able to continue on with the traditions that their mothers and grandmothers had kept. Working moms have to balance their days in a much different way than stay-at-home moms do. They have to fit chores and errands into any spare moment that they can find. Most stay-at-home-moms were either at one point working moms, or worked full-time jobs before having children. We followed in the footsteps of our moms, trying to do a little bit of everything nearly every day just to try and stay on top of our house, our jobs and our kids all at once.

When we decide to stay at home, we often believe that with the whole day to ourselves, we will be perfect housekeepers. But that isn't always the case.

When we can't seem to stay on top of the housework like we imagined we could, we often get upset with ourselves and wonder where we are going wrong. When we worked, we used to be able to get so much done in barely any time at all. How can the house be constantly messy when all we seem to do is clean?

Well, I'll tell you how.

When we worked, we all had a secret helper when it came to keeping things clean. It was our empty house. We picked up the house after the kids went to bed, got up at the crack of dawn, got ourselves ready, the kids were put into their clothes and fed while half asleep, and we were out the door in record time. Mom and Dad went to work, while the kids were off to school and daycare. There was barely enough time to for the kids to wake up and eat, much less drag out all of their toys. The house stayed, just as it was left, for the rest of the day until Mom, Dad and the kids came home in the evening. If you didn't have kids when you worked, there was even less to do and only one or two people to pick up after.

When we decide to be stay-at-home moms, we truly believe that it will be easy. If we can keep our house clean and have a career, than it makes sense that just keeping our house clean will be a breeze. What we don't take into account is the fact that our house is rarely going to be empty. Which means it will be in a constant and unstoppable state of flux.

It's not long after we begin our lives as stay-at-home moms that our days, instead of being the calm and relaxing life we imagine, for no discernable reason begin spiraling out of control. There is no time to do any of the things we planned - having coffee with friends, volunteering, taking up a new hobby. It's like the days suddenly got shorter rather than longer.

Now why is that? Well, let's take a look at a typical day for a stay-at-home mom.

You wake up on a relaxing unscheduled day. No ballet class, no mommy-and-me, no appointments. Just a nice relaxing day at home.

After dropping off your 4-year-old daughter at preschool and coming home you pick up the living room that the baby and your daughter messed up before preschool. Then you go to the kitchen to wash the breakfast dishes, put a load of laundry in the washer and see that the baby has taken all the toys out of the toy box and overturned a potted plant. So you clean the living room again.

By now, it's time for lunch, so you mess up the kitchen getting that done, and look up to see that it's time to go pick your daughter up from preschool. Since you're out anyway, you stop by the store, come home, put the groceries away, throw the laundry from the washer to the dryer and head toward the kitchen so you can clean up the lunch dishes and make dinner.

As you're walking through the living room toward the kitchen, you see that your daughter has taken all the books off the bookshelf and is arranging them by color, while the baby has gotten a marker out of his sister's backpack and has drawn blue squiggles all over himself, including his hair, managed to decorate the baseboards in the process and is now chewing on the (thankfully non-toxic and "washable") marker's felt tip.

Your husband walks through the door just in time to see you carrying his previously un-blue-squiggled baby up the stairs, followed by sister who has announced that she is going to help give the baby a bath. You holler "Order a Pizza!" down the stairs in the general direction of your beloved, and tell your daughter to get her clothes off, because if you have to wash one of them, you may as well wash both, and this is definitely going to take a while.

You come back downstairs just in time to see your husband finish his fourth piece of pizza while he's working on a project he had to bring home from the office. You plop the kids in front of the TV, the baby now only slightly blue (as long as he doesn't smile), and give them their pizza, shoving a piece in your own mouth as you head toward the kitchen to clean the mess that is still there from lunch. Then it's time to put the kids in bed, read books and check for monsters.

You head to the living room, put the books back in the bookshelves, clean the blue squiggles off the baseboards and put away the toys that the kids dragged out while they were eating their pizza, making sure not to throw the discarded pieces of pepperoni and pizza crusts in with the toys.

Only then can you go sit next to your husband and watch a little TV until you go to bed, forgetting completely about the laundry that is not only wrinkling in the dryer, but since it didn't dry completely is creating an odor that will take half of the next morning to wash out.

Nope. It's not as easy as it looks. Not at all.

When things are constantly happening, and we're constantly trying to achieve the ideal we have in our minds, we're setting ourselves up for constant work and constant aggravation. The more things get out of the control, the more often we believe we need to clean. With the house being full of people all day, the messes happen more often, so we clean more often, until feel like that's all we do and it still doesn't stay clean.

The key that many new stay-at-home moms miss, that our grandmothers lived by, is that we must set boundaries on our cleaning. The sense of completion and accomplishment we all crave will never be there as long as we keep chasing every little mess that crops up throughout the day.

Making a general schedule for yourself, similar to what grandma did, will help you put some limits on your day, and your week, and give you that feeling of accomplishment that we're all looking for.

We live in a different world than Grandma did, so it requires a different kind of schedule. Sit down and write out the major cleaning, errand running and scheduled activities you have during the week. Think about what things work best when scheduled together.

Errand running day may work best on a day when you've got a lot of activities to shuttle your kids to. On the other hand it's probably not a good idea to run errands and do laundry on the same day. Being in and out of the house all day, you may forget the laundry, or it may sit in the dryer too long and wrinkle, causing more work.

Even things like cleaning the kitchen and picking up after the kids should be limited to once or twice a day rather than every time we see a mess. Grandma putting dishes in the sink to soak was a way for her to keep the rest of the kitchen looking clean, while still being able to put limits on how many times she needed to do the dishes in a day.

So take a tip from the experience of past generations. If you make a general schedule that fits your life, everything will fall into place.

Grandma really did know what she was doing after all.