Friday Q & A — home management

Before I get started on this one let me just reiterate that although I really do give it my best shot, I’m not the greatest home manager. I can’t keep up. A couple weeks ago I forgot to go to the wedding reception of the oldest son of one of my favorite families…maybe it was because my head was still spinning from having our fridge, dishwasher and A/C all go out that same week and I was grasping at straws to get the repair-people there quick enough. I could use some home management skills myself because stuff like that throws me for a loop.

My best home management ideas are back in this post.

But here goes what I’ve got on the specific questions lately:



You mentioned all the swimming your kids do, so do we. Where/what do you do with all the towels & suits in between swims?? [My kids] leave theirs all over the place and their suits end up wherever. Hope you have ideas to help on this.



We have a very scientific method of dealing with wet towels around here. It’s called “leave-your-wet-towel-scrunched-up-in-a-ball-wherever-you-feel-like-dropping-it.” Then have your mother come get stomping-mad about it and remind you for the hundredth time that that is her very biggest pet peeve. Can you tell we have your same problem over here? The goal is to hang up towels over the fence until dry, then roll them up and put them in this metal bucket thing we have for the next person who needs them. The plan is for swimsuits to get hung on the doorknobs in the bathroom until they are dry and then put away. But obviously that is not happening. Always something to work on.

Do you make your kids keep their rooms clean? How do you enforce it when they are 4-6 years old? When my kids were toddlers, we cleaned their room together and they did great. Now they are 4.5 and 6, and getting them to clean up is a HUGE battle every day. It wears me out!!

Yes, Dave and I definitely enforce clean rooms. (That does not mean, however that on any given day you could come over and find them spotless. It’s just that we put a big emphasis on it.) It sounds like you’re on the right track with starting out cleaning the room together. I’m a huge believer in working with kids and showing them exactly what needs to be done to have a clean room (including dusting off the dresser, nightstand, organizing drawers, nothing under beds, etc.) Our rule is that they have to have their rooms clean and beds made before they leave for school every day. I think we magically lucked out that we connected the natural consequence of “no hanging out with friends” after school if they neglect these duties. The thought of not being able to hang with friends happens to scare the pants off my kids when they are in elementary school because they know from experience that we’ll really follow through, and they happen to adore their friends. Once they get older it seems like it just becomes a habit.

On Saturdays part of their outlined “Saturday Jobs” (the job charts are in this post) entail the detail bedroom work (cleaning out under beds and in drawers, etc.) so I think they just realize they may as well keep up with it during the week or their Saturday is shot.

There have been stages when they were smart enough to realize they wouldn’t have time for friends after school anyway and they’ve left their beds unmade but those phases haven’t lasted long because I guess it’s not worth all the nagging they get if they don’t.

You’re right, it’s tough when they are around 4-6 because it takes some training and time to teach and it is SO much easier to do it yourself. Lucy doesn’t generally jump to the task when I ask her to clean something up…she needs quite a bit of supervision and bribing at this point. But we totally expect her to pitch in and gradually she’s getting the fact that those expectations aren’t going anywhere. It’s nice to have older kids to help her too and set good examples.

It takes some training (and blood and sweat sometimes too) but it makes me happy to go past their bedrooms and have them all straight and in order (most of the time).

How do you find time to prioritize prayer and scripture study around everything else that’s going on in your home?



I’ve been really, really working on my Personal Progress goals lately and there’s a section on striving to do personal prayer and scriptures every day diligently for three weeks. I thought I kinda did that, but once I started tracking I realized I wasn’t actually so hot at it. Sure, we have family scriptures and prayer each morning, but I was letting my personal prayer and reading slip a little. So I carved out time every morning before the kids woke up to squeeze those in. Just fifteen extra minutes. But those fifteen minutes made the rest of the day go so much better. Throughout my life I have to keep learning over and over and over again that those two things make the difference in so much of the rest of life. I’m not perfect at it by any means, but I know if I start my day of with scripture and prayer everything seems more calm and organized.

Ok, please expand on the friends Q&A and the 6 pm rule {from this post} – is that always? Because it seems like you have posts and pics that must take place after that time and seem to involve friends. I’m a bit in awe of this because we struggle quite a bit here with the friend thing…Please expand on the 6 pm rule!!

The 6:00 rule is our guideline. As a general rule, kids go home by six unless a friend happens to be staying for dinner. We’re good with that every once-in-a-while. The kids’ dinner-guests join in for our reports on “happies and sads” for the day and we encourage them to have a “lot or a little” of everything on the menu (this is our rule on trying new things) which may or may not scare them off the next time :). If our kids aren’t home by 6:00 from friend’s houses they have to do the dishes as well as an extra job which whips them into shape most of the time. BUT we realize we do have to have some flexibility here and there, and we go through times where we slack off a little. I really, really try to have dinner ready and on the table at 6:00 but I cannot say that it always happens. Elle has tennis on Tues and Thurs from 5-7 and we have piano lessons on Tuesday afternoons and gymnastics throws us for a loop as well. Plus, when I don’t plan out the meals well we get off schedule. But with all the homework and reading and practicing that needs to be done as our kids grow older we feel like we really need to protect our family time. 6:00 is what we aim for and we do our best.



I’d love to know what a “day in the life” looks like… generally speaking of course! What are you aiming for? It sounds like you exercise in the morning? How does that work?

We are still trying to finalize our daily routine but as of right now this is how our mornings go:

6:00 — Max and Elle are up

6:15 — Elle practices

6:35 — family scriptures

6:45 — breakfast

6:55 — Max leaves to catch the bus

7:00 — breakfast clean-up, watch hair-do tutorials on the internet :), sign school schedules, pack lunches, backpacks, etc.

7:30 — Elle leaves, the younger girls get dressed, make beds, etc.

8:00 — Grace and Claire leave, Lu gets dressed, we read, run errands, etc.

Still trying to get used to the afternoon preschool thing for Lucy…still more tweaking needed.

As far as exercise goes, last year I did exercise almost every morning at 6:00 because we had more time…Max didn’t have to leave ’til 7:30 and so our whole routine was shifted later. This year I’m still trying to get my groove on with my P90X and Insanity switch-off. So far I have tried doing it at 5:30 and also doing it while the girls are doing their after-breakfast jobs. I kinda like that because I can direct/talk to them while I’m working out but it makes for some pauses to help find a lunch box or sign a note for school.

After school is still tbd because we are still trying to sort out what we are ok with the kids being involved in this year. I’m trying to hold off on things as much as I can and trying to find a good balance.

How much time (roughly) do you spend on blogging each day? You blog so often and your blog posts are so well thought out, full of pics (which of course need editing, compressing, etc) and often carry important messages, yet we all know you’ve got kids and obligations like the rest of us.

I always wonder this same thing of other bloggers who seem to post regularly. My own answer to this question over the summer was “way too much!” In general am a big fan of the “scheduling” option in blogger…I can write a bunch of posts and schedule them to post whenever I want if I know I’m not going to have enough time one week, etc. But summer stuff throws me for a loop because first of all I take way too many pictures, and second, I have so much I’m dying to record before school takes over (which it already has, and I have like 823 more pictures I haven’t even looked at from summer). Although it would be nice to say I’m doing this for blog readers, I’m really doing it because I’m a journal-keeper by nature. I feel compelled to record life before it slips away from my memory.

During the summer I want to be with my kids and family eeking out all the time I can with them during the day and then I want to be with Dave when he gets home, or with my family at Bear Lake, blah blah blah so this summer I generally ended up editing pictures and pre-scheduling posts in the wee hours of the morning. I realized that needs to come to a halt when I got feisty with a poor lady at the art museum the other day. I need more sleep.

I have so many thoughts and theories continually running through my brain that I wish I could just stop and write down, and there are so many thought-provoking questions from readers that have made me really contemplate how Dave and I parent. But there are also continual needs of a big family looming in front of me and I always have to make sure they are coming first. My big goal for the year is to be “present” with my family and friends so I’m always trying to find a good balance between “being there” and recording just how “being there” came off…and actually sleeping every once in a while 🙂

The short version of this answer (which I should have posted first) is that I spend a very varying amounts of time blogging each day. I have a bazillion “drafts” from random thoughts/pictures and if I don’t have much time I just finish one of them and schedule it to post the next day. Some days (now that school is in session) I have more time and I’ll go through a few batches of pictures and get them ready to post. I just take it as I can do it and go from there.

And I rarely blog over the weekend. That time is sacred family/Dave time.

Have a great one!