To think that the “sod the housework” advice is really unhelpful

[cadburyegg]

Just that really. We have a 3 yr old at 9 month old, I’m on maternity leave yet the advice is now to sod the housework and make memories with the kids. I struggle to keep on top of it all but the bare minimum I need to do is a load of laundry per day, washing dishes, preparing food, clearing work spaces etc because we all need to eat and wear clean clothes.

I think this advice should be changed to helpful tips on how to do bits during the day while making sure the kids get the attention they need. AIBU?

machine doesn't fit a full load of king size bedding,

Really? Just checked and ours is 9kg wash, 7kg dry and a super king duvet cover, fitted sheet and 6 pillowcases doesn’t come close to 2/3rds full.

When you are looking after little children, doing a load of washing and hanging it up every day, keeping on top of the dishes (be it washing up or dishwasher) and cooking something reasonable (not to mention shopping for food) is as much as should be expected. And even then that will be a struggle if you want to do anything else in the day such as - shock horror - going out to meet friends, or sit with a book when the children are napping.

We have had a cleaner at times and that cleaner has done 3 hours per week for us (average sized house). Window cleaning and oven cleaning are also outsourced. Imo the wohp should definitely help with tidying away toys, cooking, washing up, bathing dc, gathering up laundry when they get home from work. If you don't have a cleaner, do 1.5 hours each of hoovering and bathroom cleaning and bed changing at the weekend. Wohps can put away their own clean clothes and do their own ironing.

No way should the person at home be expected to do it all!

I sodded the house work. Then I got mice. I don’t recommend it.

I do recommend not getting too stressed about housework and balancing it with time with kids and time for you. But really the best way to do that I think is to do little and often so it doesn’t build up. And to get the rest of the family involved.

As I said - saying ‘sod the housework’ DOESN’T mean do no housework - it means maybe relaxing your standards a bit or finding some shortcuts, so you have time to spend with the children, and to rest when the baby is little.

It doesn’t mean do nothing so the family starves and you are all living in squalor!

Surely when people say this it's usually in response to someone who's feeling overwhelmed but it turns out they're ironing pillowcases and scrubbing skirting boards? I've never seen anyone specifically advocating wearing a bin bag and using a comb to eat scrambled eggs from a shoe. It means "lower your standards and just do the essentials", not "live in your wheelie bin."

Declutter
Good storage
Be out a lot

Ah there you go then pouty your machine is bigger than ours. We'll replace it with a bigger one but 8 years in it's still going strong...

I think I am like most people in real life. Not a super clean house - never bleached skirting boards!! But not super messy and dirty either.

In terms of cleaning with a baby, it depends very much on your baby. Some happily take long naps in a cot and sleep through the night, other scream if they are put down. You can't generalise.

I do think some bored or anxious type women create housework for themselves.

When they say sod the housework, I think people are talking about stuff like not bothering to wash the skirting boards, dust the tops of picture frames and hoover the corners of the ceiling.

None of which has ever been done more than once every couple of years chez snowflake anyway.

As toddlers they both loved when I let them use the baby wipes to dust or clean up. 5yo still does at times.

The planet!

I've never seen anyone specifically advocating wearing a bin bag and using a comb to eat scrambled eggs from a shoe.

😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂

Decluttering isn't the way to go. Not buying stuff in the first place, and restricting all the tat that people want to give as presents.

That's ok if you are just starting out and being careful about purchases but unrealistic for most people who already have the stuff.

Well OP must be busy dusting since she hasn't come back.
Or is it a light it and run thread again?

Thanks for all the posts. I’ll try and reply to some of them.

Any reason it has to be you doing that?
Well my dh can't make lunch for the kids when he's at work but I think we have a reasonable balance. He makes dinner for us all and spends time with the kids/ baths them in the evening / does bedtime (apart from breastfeeding) while I do a bit of housework. But I do the stuff during the day because I'm here and he isn't.

Galavanting all day long then expecting the person who’s been working all day to do all the work is absolutely fucking ridiculous.
I wouldn't call looking after two young kids gallivanting tbh.

How do you manage to have a laundry load every day for three people?
We just do! Sheets are probably only changed every other week tbh. 3 year old gets mucky, sometimes has the odd toilet accident. I guess it depends on the people in the family and also the kids ages. Like yesterday the baby did a poosplosion which leaked onto our duvet cover, and today the 3 year old spilt juice all over me. I'd like to think these things will happen less in 5 years time!

On maternity I could stay at home in my pyjamas all day if I wanted, it didn't feel like work to me.
Yeah.... I could do that when DS1 was a baby but now he needs stimulation, exercise, unfortunately that usually means getting dressed and doing something productive.

So if your kids are sufficiently easy to allow you those sentiments, OP, good for you. Not everyone has that experience.
You've missed my point. Doesn't matter how easy or difficult the kids are, they still need food and clothes to wear!

Well OP must be busy dusting since she hasn't come back.
Or is it a light it and run thread again?
If I'm posting this kind of thread I've hardly got the time to sit on MN all day, have I? I chose to wait till the kids are in bed and read the thread fully.

Baby DS2 sleeps pretty well but the 3 year old DS1 is just as demanding if not more so tbh. Baby's needs are still pretty basic (he's also not mobile yet). DS1 needs a bit more attention emotionally so DS2 is napping DS1 and I often sit down and read a book/do a jigsaw/crafts etc.

Before I had DS1 we were used to blitzing the house at the weekends. But that became tricky, we eventually found the organised mum method which we follow loosely. I guess what i was trying to say in my OP is that it would have been helpful to have been given tips on how to do bits every day rather than "oh leave the housework and put your feet up" which was the main advice given when DS1 was a baby, particularly with regards to breastfeeding.

Is the 3 yo starting nursery soon?

Change only when needed (poo,wet) or if going out. They don't need a new outfit for every crumb.
Put wash on either early morning or even better at night when they're in bed.
Do dishes while you're cooking a meal and clear worktops as you go.
Get the 3 yo to help with putting things away.
Invest in good storage.
Hoover/sweep/mop as close to the last mealtime as possible.
Have chill days with no elaborate meals , finger painting, glitter spreading etc stuff, where you can just say sod it, and have less cleaning to do .
Prioritise the jobs.

Yes gallivanting. If you’re off making memories with your kids I’d hardly call that working. Is it really that hard to stick a washing on/hang it out/give the bathroom a clean or Hoover? Not all at once but one thing a day really shouldn’t be too taxing.

But this is Mumsnet and that will be shot down.

Actually forkinghellmate I never said it's hard to stick a wash on, but keeping on top of absolutely everything in the house is quite tricky yes. I never said I was busy making memories or whatever, just what the advice is these days. You've misinterpreted my post.

Do you actually have children?

The thing is, it shouldn't be that hard for two healthy adults to keep an average family home clean, not with the plethora of cleaning products and labour saving devices we have avaliable.

I used to clean professionally, including one off deep cleans and declutters, and the really messy/dirty houses were about half the time inhabited by women with health problems, DH problems, or both. I mean, how are you meant to keep a house tidy when you can't bend down, reach up, and dh is a lazy sod when it comes to cleaning? It was a pleasure to make their houses nice again, frankly,because you could see how stressed it made them

The other half were people who would have saved money and time by getting rid of the tons of useless shit they had lying about. If you have 3 teenagers who each own 20 t-shirts, then it makes it easier for the little sods to chuck a t-shirt in a heap after one wear, especially if you then lack the time and energy to absolutely be on their back about tidying and doing the washing - and even then we're talking teenagers here. That's 60+ t-shirts circulating around your house at worst, taking up room and gathering dust at best. Probably duplicates of each other too. Get rid of at least half of everything you own, and your housework will also halve,as if by magic.

Everyone will have different standards, but if the house is a complete shit tip, kids will not appreciate all the "making memories" if they also possess memories of feeling embarressed because they can't invite friends round to their home. A relative of mine lived in a very messy house as a child, and she often recalls the shame she felt when friends visited. It got to the point where she didn't invite friends back at all. She also went the other way in adulthood and would clean until 3am the night before visitors were due. I was in the house myself as a child - piles of dishes stacked high complete with hardened on dirt, piles of washing over the sofas that you had to move before you could sit, piles of random crap that lay on the stairs for months,little piles of things that sort of grew like mushrooms in random corners. Always a damp musty smell. Now, as an adult, I tend to think that piles of things you have to move around to get to other areas/clean around are a bad sign

I never said I was busy making memories or whatever, just what the advice is these days

I said this upthread but... the advice from who? Are professionals telling you this? HV’s etc? My DC are 5 and 3 and I’m pregnant with my third and honestly no one has ever told me to neglect basic housework in favour of ‘making memories’.
If people are saying this, surely it’s usually in response to someone setting too high standards for themselves and struggling to cope with all the perceived demands on them? It’s not blanket advice aimed at all parents that it’s ok to live in filth as long as you are ‘making memories’ is it?
My housework standards dropped when mine were tiny (especially with 2 under 2, neither of whom slept more than 2 hours at a time) but we didn’t live in squalor, I still did the washing/basic cleaning etc. I didn’t bleach skirting boards, that’s for sure.

I think only you know what level of untidiness you can tolerate as we are all different and that's fine.

Perhaps make a weekly or bi-weekly schedule of what can be done on a daily basis, then the other jobs that can be done every couple of weeks. You can then decide who is responsible for which jobs/tasks and allocate accordingly.

You don't need to stick to it religiously at all, but I find when my brain is a bid muddled and preoccupied with other things, to have something to refer back to is invaluable, so you don't get that 'oh my god what needs to be done' feeling, because it's all written down and .... if it doesn't need doing, no problem, just move on to the next task.

People mean prioritise and don’t stress if it isn’t perfect. I have a severely autistic son and if I had prioritised housework and the way the house looked over the last 20 years then quite simply we would have all cracked up. It doesn’t mean we never wash up and only have one outfit it means things aren’t always tidy & I don’t have heart failure if he put a hole in the wall (I save that for when he headbutts glass).

Seriously though when he was tiny a professional working with us said it was good we didn’t stress about the house, because if we did it would make the pressure unbearable.

I think that’s what people mean...