To ask what other housework you complete as a SAHM of a 1-2yo?

[CatCake]

What do.you do in addition to caring for your baby / young toddler? How are chores / as allocation of free time managed outside of working hours? I saw a model referenced on another thread where SAHP is fully responsible for the child whilst WP is engaged in work routine during their working hours but childcare and chores are both parents' responsibility outside these times. Is this how it works in your house, if one of you is a SAHP? Interested in any other examples of how different households manage this.

The best thing to do is to wear baby on your back in a sling/baby carrier (the way many women around the world do)

Baby likes being close to you, and will usually fall asleep at some point. You get a workout AND things get done.

I’m not a SAHM but I currently work 3 days and my DH does full time compressed into 4. Therefore I’m home a lot more than he is. I personally think that whoever spends more time in the home should do a bit more of the housework/chores. I am around more as I have an extra day off and don’t work long days (he does 8-6) so it’s easier for me to Chuck a wash on or put the Hoover round. However with a young toddler it’s only 5 min jobs. I wouldn’t expect you to be spending your time trying to entertain DC while also deep cleaning a sofa or doing the skirting boards. Just more of the general day to day empty dishwasher/hang out washing/hoover/mop/quick wipe down of the bathroom.

At the weekends you should absolutely be 50/50 on everything and your purpose is not to ensure that your DH never has to do any housework. Your primary role is to take care of DC during the week, it doesn’t mean you should also be facilitating a responsibility/chore-free weekend for your DH.

I work 1-2 days a week (last week was just a day) at the moment as have just gone self employed. Baby is 18 months. We have two other young kids. Dh is up the same time as me and will get bigger two sorted in the morning, I pack their lunch bags the night before and top up with fruit in the morning. Whoever is free gets baby dressed and gets all 3 down to breakfast. All 3 kids eat breakfast, baby is usually spoon-fed porridge but will often eat herself. If dh is in the office, I do all of this on my own. He will get their breakfast on the table before he leaves.

I do the school run if he is in the office, cook the dinner and clean the house, do laundry. When he gets home or finishes work he will feed baby dinner, load dishwasher and run a hoover around (if I didn't get to it). If he is working from home he does the school run himself and will put out laundry and male us both lunch and cups of tea, coffee. I normally get all the kids ready for bed and do bathtime. He will take over and give baby a bottle and then put her to bed whilst I do homework, a bit of maths or reading a story to each of our older two. Sometimes we switch it up so we both get one on one time qith each child. He cooks twice a week. He doesn't have any hobbies as such but does go to the gym but only once kids are in bed 2x a week.

I would say I do the lions share whilst he is working but once he is home it is a fairly even split. I wouldn't have settled for any less though and we discussed this pre marriage and kids. It's a balance that works for us and does change when I work more hours. I don't think it's necessarily about copying other people's set up, you need to both work put what feels right for your family.

My dh compressed his hours too and does a 4 day working week ( I would normally work on his day off) but spends 2 days in the office now.

I have two under two and my jobs are; feeding both lunch and tidying kitchen afterwards, getting both to nap in the daytime, washing their cloth nappies and clothes etc, changing their bedding and management of health condition of one and appointments etc as well as play and development in the daytime.

My husband and I do bedtime together. When he finishes work everything is shared 50/50 although we have different tasks we have assigned to ourselves. So my job and his job have the same hours in that sense ..apart from I am also doing all the baby's nights this time around!

I’m not a SAHP but during both my maternity leaves (and for some time longer after my second), I was. I would get as much of the housework done as I could manage: one to two jobs a day - hoovering downstairs one day, upstairs the next, bathroom the next etc. I found this manageable whilst still doing things with my boys. Anything I didn’t get done was then split between my husband and me during evenings or weekends.

Now I’m part time and my boys are at school. I fit as much as I can into my days off (errands, appointments, shopping, cleaning) and again, anything I don’t manage we split at the weekend!

Sahm, 16 mth old.
I do hoovering, dusting, bathrooms, mopping etc during the week whilst DC is napping. I do some batch cooking. Food shopping.
In the evenings when DH is home, we share childcare and cooking dinner and washing up after. All equal time wise. He does more of the childcare and I do more of the cooking just because he needs time with DC.
Weekend jobs are DIY, gardening. We share these too.

Basically I do all the chores which are possible to do whilst DC is napping or whilst he's playing and I can multitask. With a more demanding child or a poor napper this might not be possible. If it wasn't, DH would happily do more chores, because he knows I do as much as I can. I do have a lunch break!

I clearly had a very chilled out baby ... I was a SAHM & had no difficulty doing basic housework, shopping, cooking, laundry done etc ... admittedly my standards are a lot lower than most mumsnetters but my DS was a great sleeper so I just pottered around doing stuff whilst he napped or he would happily lie in his cot/play pen whilst I got on with things ... not that I did housework all day ... had loads of time for my hobbies, volunteering (just took DS with me) etc etc. If I am honest my 'quality' of life was much easier than my DH's who worked long hours & more than pulled his weight at weekends & evenings .. if I wanted to go out/meet friends etc I just got on with it.

I'm a SAHM. When DS was under 1, my DH cooked most evenings. In the first few months he also did the washing and food shopping. I did all the night wakings and essentially cared for DS.

As DS got older, I took on more. I cooked on weeknights, did all of the laundry, hoovered, loaded/unloaded dishwasher, cleaned etc. DH was expected to cook on weekends and clean the bathroom.

However, I'm now pregnant and struggling with nausea and tiredness. DH has had to do some laundry and occasionally cooks in the week. I still generally clean but I must admit that I don't hoover as often and the house generally feels a little more cluttered. Hopefully things will become a bit easier now that I've emerged from the first trimester...

Not a SAHP but went on furlough in the pandemic then straight into maternity leave with my second DC so obviously spending a lot of time at home! Managed most housework - laundry, dishes, shopping, most of the cooking, dusting & hoovering. I'd do the bathroom & kitchen cleaning in nap time.

I work part time now and try to get as much done round the kids as possible, they are well trained so happy to help with tidying and cleaning and most jobs only take a short time if you keep on top of them I find. Bigger jobs like sorting paperwork or clothes or any DIY either gets done of an evening or at the weekend when DH and I tag team.

I was a sahm when DC were small. 2 year ish gap. DH mostly out of the house 8.30-6ish.

DH usually got up with DC and did their breakfast most days. I took over from 7.30/8ish. I did pretty much all cooking, washing up, dishwasher unloading, laundry, basic cleaning, supermarket shop and general errands etc during the time he was at work.

Evenings and weekends DH did the majority of the bath and bedtime work (I was usually cleaning up after dinner or whatever at this point). I did major cleaning either during nap time or on a weekend. My kids were good nappers in their cots when small, and then did quiet time in their rooms for an hour ish once they dropped the nap, so I had time in the day to get on with things. Although my DD didn’t sleep great at night, or sleep through til she was over 3 so that didnt help. Also my housework standards probably aren’t the highest!

Almost all housework during the week was down to me. Shared at weekends, although housework was minimal at the weekend.

My husband worked long hours and it was my job to keep the house going. It really wasn't that difficult.

I should add that I had mine in the 80's when it was acceptable to put them in their rooms to nap and benign neglect was the order of the day.

None of us are sahp but we split the workload depending on hours out of the house, I leave at 6:30 and get home between 5:30 and 6:00 depending on the day, twice a week DC1 meet me outside the house to go straight to clubs and we get home at 7:30. OH leaves the house at 7:30-7:40 and drops kids at breakfast club then finishes before three to pick kids up, as OH is home more hours than I am they have more chance to do things like wash up, put washing on, hang it out etc and Hoover. Bigger jobs like cleaning the bathroom etc we split at weekends. I usually also cook except for nights DC is at clubs, we both out different DC to bed and I usually also dress at least one sometimes two DC in the mornings and sort about 50% of breakfasts. I also do all the major sorting kids bedrooms etc in holidays but OH does more in the garden and has in last year or so taken over remembering to pay gas and electric bill etc.
it works for us but you have to find what works for you.

I’m not a SAHM now, but when I was on maternity leave with my second and not working for a short period afterwards, I tried to do whatever I could do during the day and then we split whatever didn’t get done.

My second went through a phase between about 8-12 months of being an absolutely shocking napper, clingy as hell, but also hating the buggy or carrier, and at the same time my oldest was peak terrible twos. So some days the amount I could do round the house was zero and that was fine. My DH always understood.

Sorry, pressed send too soon. I think the answers you get will vary a lot because there’s no one size-fits-all experience for a SAHP. It depends on the child(ren), their age and their temperament. When I just had one child who was a brilliant napper and sleeper my DH didn’t need to lift a finger round the house because keeping it running was an absolute piece of piss and I wanted to maximise weekend family time. When I had a crazy toddler and a very tricky baby who thought sleep was for the weak, he had to do a lot more.

Our set up was a little different in that he worked 7 days a week (albeit only a couple of hours on the 7th day) so there was no typical weekend where he was off work and around. His time off work was usually spent doing whatever he needed to do (paperwork/admin/haircut/cutting nails/vehicle maintenance/diy) and the the rest relaxing.

So I did all childcare, cleaning, laundry, groceries, shopping, cooking, made his lunches. I expected him to put his own clean clothes away, to tidy away his own stuff from around the house, to help with the post dinner clear up and he always helped with bedtime. He resented being asked to do all of those apart from bedtime.

I got frustrated a lot of the time at not being able to get stuff done with a baby/toddler in tow and him expecting to be able to just relax when he got home no matter how hard a day/night I’d had because he’d “been at work all day”. I also found it hard that he had some justifiable relaxation time because “it’s the only time off I get all week” but I was on duty 24/7 with no break ever, especially when the babies weren’t sleeping well. He’d say just chill when they’re asleep but they only slept in a moving pram and sometimes for ten minutes afterwards and I had to get some stuff done sometimes. I found it really hard to hang laundry up with a baby in a sling for example.

We’re through that stage now!

I worked 16 hours a week when I looked after my son at this age, I did everything during the day, then DH would do dishes at night, housework at weekends etc. My son was in a regular nap schedule at that age so it was easy to put dinner on etc. You have to find what works for you.... I do think babies no need to be entertained 24/7. It's fine to ensure they are safe and then do some jobs that need doing.

I do the vast majority of the laundry and meal planning/shopping/cooking. All the school/nursery admin, school run, the “mental load” kid things. Everything else is about 50:50.