To ask how the eff people keep their homes and kids immaculate!?

[ThisCharmingmamm]

I'm a SAHM to a 4 yo and a 7mo. I could clean all day and it would still look like a bomb has gone off.

I could get the kids changed 400 times a day, bath them 3 times and they'd still be grubby and bedraggled!

Don't even get me started on myself. I resemble something that looks like a cross between miss trunchbull and mrs doubtfire.

When we go out to baby groups or soft play so many of the mums have a full face of make up, they look stunning, with a put together outfit and their kids squeaky clean and even on trend themselves. I can just bet their home is the same.

I am ashamed of myself for not being able to keep up with the Joneses I have to say

I agree with above, it depends how your house was pre-kids.

I hate mess, I can't stand to see laundry drying everywhere and I cannot relax if my house is a tip. Pre kids it was decluttered and tidy, because there was no reason why it would be a mess. As long as there is a place for everything, it takes the same amount of time to chuck things where they belong than it takes to throw them on the floor.

It works the same way with kids. House is tidy when I go to bed, and I clean 1 hour first thing every morning, so by 7 or 7:30 it's done. I can't have a lay-in, the kids wake me up! It leaves the rest of the day to enjoy your life.

I have a dish washer so anything dirty goes straight in, and it takes second to wipe the tops in the kitchen.

The kids play as much as they want with what they want, but when they have finish, the toys go back in their storage.

I never tidy up before guests turn up, why would I? At worst I ask the kids to take the toys from the living room to their own bedroom. Everything else is good enough for me, so good enough for people who don't live here.

Everybody has clean clothes first thing in the morning, if they get too dirty they get changed, otherwise they are fine for the day.

As long as it works for you, who cares what everybody thinks? If you don't like the state of your house, work on finding appropriate storage and system for absolutely everything. Your house will never be tidy if there's literally nowhere designed to put everything when you come home - shoes, coats, hats, mail, handbags, book bags, school bags, sport kit, shopping and the list goes on.

My baby group is half and half. Most babies look great, nice clothes and clean faces. But half the mums are in trackies and ponytails, and the other half nice outfits and make up. It totally depends on your children I think. I have 1 chilled out nearly 8mo who naps reliably or plays happily for 30 minutes alone so I can get a shower and dressed, and get my house cleaned. Doubt I could do that with 2 young children.

I have 4 outfits that I wear when going out so I always look 'put together' and I follow the organised mum cleaning method which has changed my life. I also have a husband who works shifts so is at home during the day a lot!

Don't worry about it. Everyone is different and as long as your kids are warm, fed, loved and safe that is really all that matters.

I wake up before DC to get ready.
I have set routines to do throughout the day to keep the house clean.
I only buy clothes for me and the DC which are smart and stick to a 'type' so literally everything matches and looks put together.

No cleaner and my DC have never been babysat or gone to nursery. Just good routine and timekeeping and making decent effort to prioritise our appearance and the house.

My house is looking amazing. DS at school, DP asleep (night shifts) I am going to enjoy the next few hours of it being clean.

This event happens about once every 2-3 years

Kids I have no idea, but with the house and myself, it was all a mess all the time when I had 2 at home full time. When one went to school it got a little better and now the youngest is at nursery a few hours a week it has made a huge difference. Things often look quite ordered now! So I think it’s the amount of time you have in your home when your kids are not in it!

IME no one does everything. So those who look perfect and who have perfect houses are not doing something else.

I once spoke to a friend about all the time she spent taking her children out and about. I said I didn't know how she fit it in. She said she didn't do half of the day to day stuff I did. It comes down to our priorities. I know being clean and having a clean house seem like basic necessities (and I feel the same), but they're not your priorities in the same way they might be someone else's. IMO there are ways to achieve what they achieve but everyone has constraints. If I had a cleaner or stuck to TOMM all the time and got up at 5am to do make up then yes I would appear as "they" all do. However I have a newborn and a toddler and a 7yo so my life and house is carnage - the housework has gone to shit and I haven't had a bath in 4 days!!!! If I had a cleaner or fewer children then it would be different but it's not. I'm not at all envious of the mum at school who has a younger newborn and is wearing make up and looks pulled together. 😤

My house looks fine but DS...! I can bath him, blow dry his hair, put clean neat clothes on him, then 5 seconds later he look like an ad for Childline. He just prefers his hair on end, tends to be full of snot, likes to wear his trousers rapper style (exposing an inch of Thomas the Tank Engine Y fronts), changes his shoes to trainers when my back is turned... It looks like I can't be arsed, but it is all him, I swear!

Don't worry about it. Everyone is different and as long as your kids are warm, fed, loved and safe that is really all that matters.

Jomalone, you've got it in a nutshell. My house was always 'clean enough to be healthy, dirty enough to be happy'. Now my sons are both grown and have turned out just fine. Their memories aren't whether or not the house was clean, but the love in our home and the times we spent together.

I find as I clean something, DS (2 years) is destroying another area, so it becomes a bit pointless. I love having a clean and tidy house but the reality is different and I've made my peace with it a bit, I'm on top of most of it (washing up/washing/general tidying) but everywhere could do with a proper clean.

DS generally looks ok, clean clothes and face but unless I am going to work I generally look like shit! Need to sort out my roots and don't always get the time to paint my face, but I'm not trying to impress anyone so don't feel the need to make a huge effort (maybe I should care more but I don't!).

I am not looking forward to next year when I will have DS and a newborn! At that point I'm just going to shut my eyes and wait for it to pass!

One tidy room is all you need. Just don’t let visitors go upstairs!

My house fluctuates massively. I clean and do the laundry every Friday morning with my toddler (because I only work a half day Friday afternoon) and then my husband comes home and follows up with a quick whiz around with the vacuum. So some weeks it's lovely at the weekend and then declines steadily over the week. But recently I had morning sickness so cleaning was the last thing on my mind on a Friday morning, I struggle even to take care of my toddler, so do the bare minimum of cleaning I can get away with to not live in squalor. Then I got better but this week I've been focused on a big presentation for work so have used all of my spare time to do that instead of spending it cleaning, so right now my house is a state!
Might try and get on top of some cleaning tonight if I'm not too tired after work! It's about priorities. Often there's more important stuff (to me) than constant cleaning.

All Mums feel the same and its probably not as bad as you think, women tend to be hard on themselves, for all you know people are looking at you and think how well you look and how well dressed the children are.

Mine are the same age OP and i/they/the house are all pretty well turned out. No cleaner or grandparents.

Only really achieved by always keeping house tidy and having very little clutter, having lots of organisation and hacks.

For example, Sunday night I lay out 5 days of outfits for me and each kid. I make a month of sandwiches and freeze once a month. Ditto husband's shirts- 20 ironed once a month. School bags have own peg.

Good routines: load of washing on every evening, hung up overnight, tumbled during breakfast time. Bathrooms and kitchen cleaned every Mon and Fri. Thurs night change all towels and beds. Friday night hoover and mop all house. Bf baby whilst reading with 4yr old. Batch cook for baby. Slow cooker for evening meals.

I go out to work. If I SAH the house is so much messier!

I don't trust people with immaculate houses. It's like they're trying to hide evidence. Who have they murdered and where is the body?

I have 1 child, a 12 yo DD. We have never been able to keep the house clean.

She's into sailing and scouting and adventure and hockey and basketball and playing on the green with her BFF, so wet gear, mud, grass (dead or still green), seaweed and shells and fishbones, you name it - it comes into our house.

She likes to cook and bake, so there are streaks of tomato sauce, chunks of cheese, dribbles of olive oil, mayonnaise smears, clouds of flour, scatterings of sugar, .....all over the kitchen.

She enjoys her showers and baths - we've relatively recently put away the stacking cups and the ducks from the bathroom (that always needed adult assistance back into their container!), but there are at least 6 facecloths after every one, and usually smears of shampoo and conditioner, along with dribbles of shower gel, and powdered remains of bath bombs - and quite likely large puddles on the floor - after every engagement in there.....

Clothes scattered throughout the house. Boots, shoes, sailing boots, runners, and fluffy socks for indoors - ditto.

She actually is slowly starting to improve in the past 6 months or so. Her hot water bottle is brought downstairs most mornings. She is getting better at making sure her laundry makes it to the hamper. Occasionally a towel is replaced on a rack. The cooking is getting slightly less messy and occasionally she cleans up after herself or others. That sort of thing - but I really am looking forward to when she leaves home and I can keep the whirlwind at bay!!

My strategies when DS was a toddler were to keep him out of the house as much as possible. Joined every playgroup going, went to singing groups at local library, baby/toddler swimming, out for long walks with buggy to different playgrounds around the city. This tired him out so that when he was at home he was less ‘destructive’ and reduced the amount of time he had available to make too much mess.

I also rotated his toys...so he would only have a few things out at a time and other toys were ‘hidden’ out of the way and then swapped over every couple of weeks. Then he played in a more focused way with the ‘new’ toys that he’d not seen for a while, and it stopped the house becoming a sea of toys that he wasn’t really playing with. And tidying up at the end of the day was more manageable with a restricted number of toys.

I was also (still am) really strict on what could be eaten where. After seeing friends with kids just being allowed to trail around the house however they liked with crisps and biscuits or sticky food - resulting in crumbs all over the floor and sofa - I was determined to avoid this (as I absolutely hate cleaning!!!). So snacks and drinks were only ever allowed to be eaten while sitting at the table (with me also having a snack with him and reading a story to stop him wandering off). Food mess in one concentrated area is much easier to clean up than when it’s all over the place.

As he got older, I allowed some snacks (non-messy foods like a raw carrot or apple or celery stick) to be eaten on the sofa while watching tv. But if he wanted something like biscuits or crisps or yogurt, then he would have to turn the tv off and sit properly at the table to eat it. Growing up with these rules means that even now he is much older, if he’s hungry but doesn’t want to stop watching his favourite program, he will always ask for just an apple or carrot. A parent of one of his school friends even commented to us recently after he’d been there for a play date, how impressed she was when her kids were asking for biscuits, he took his and sat at the table to eat it, while her kids just ate theirs while continuing to run around.

None of these things made me look particularly clean, smart and ‘put together’, but they did mean that keeping the house tidy and clean was much more manageable.

I ruthlessly went through my house and binned all the shit so I literally don’t have much clutter, a few pictures, couple of cook books, ornaments etc and all my nice stuff I put in a lockable cabinet from ikea so sticky fingers can’t touch it.

Similarly I got rid of most of my clothes and my stuff is all interchangeable so I can literally grab anything from my wardrobe and put it on.

DS is the same, all of his stuff goes so I can dress him as quickly as I can.

I have a cleaning schedule that I stick to religiously and now is just second nature.

We have a wash day per member of the family which whilst I have to use the washer more makes it far more manageable for me to iron and put away.

A clean child? I’ll get back to you on that one... I can’t get the porridge stain out of his eyebrow and it’s been there since Friday...

Let's get a bit of perspective: life is temporary and fleeting, what is your priority for how you spend it?

Constantly cleaning, tidying, ironing, making your children look like perfect little dolls... Or other experiences?

As long as it's not a health hazard or in such a state it's causing safety problems or dragging your mood down, then does it matter?

When you're gone do you want to be remembered for your spotless house or for other things?

The most important thing is to get organise around your lifestyle.

As an example, I change handbags at least once a day, so mine are easily accessible. If they were in a box in the loft, they would just end up in a big pile because I wouldn't bother going in the loft daily. If you keep the same one for weeks, you can put the others safely away.

Just remember that it takes a lot less time to be tidy and keep things tidy than to frantically look for missing keys/documents/glasses/phone when you lose them.

So snacks and drinks were only ever allowed to be eaten while sitting at the table (with me also having a snack with him and reading a story to stop him wandering off).

it's a brilliant tip, and it also prevent kids getting into unhealthy habit of snacking endlessly and for the sake of it during the day. People who don't snack tend to stay much slimmer in the long term, result.

I was brought up in an immaculate house. Immaculate in an OCD way

Any mess was not tolerated, and even now, decades later, visitors are restricted to the kitchen. If you need the toilet expect to be followed/ find mother suddenly doing an urgent job right outside the toilet door - going in to expect the shitter after you have been

It wasn't a home, it was living in a museum. My house looks lived in, as long as kitchen and bathroom are clean, I dont stress

My sister is this parent. She has 3 children, and you would never have known they lived there. The youngest is 12 now, and their house is perfect. They were all trained from an early age that their toys are only to be in their bedrooms, and put away immediately. They have 'show cushions' on their beds, which they were were shown how to place. remove and put back, and were never to be slept on!

I have 4 young children and a massive dog, and my house is the absolute opposite!

I’ve just visited a friend like this. House is like a show home. Both work full time. What I noticed was:

Not too much stuff
Clean up kitchen before bed
Beds made in the morning
Eating only allowed at table or in basement
All the toys in their rooms or basement (and again not too much stuff)
All coats, shoes etc put away in foyer cupboard straight away

It was the lack of clutter that made it look tidy.

Also, people with immaculate homes and clean kids still have bedtime stories, days out and are allowed to jump in muddy puddles. They can climb trees and bake cookies and make a mess everywhere - the difference is I teach them to clean up after themselves. I'm their mum not their maid. Just because my kids look well looked after it doesn't mean I'm depriving them of a childhood