Tidy playing area=happy children!!

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I'm making a statement here but I firmly believe that children who are wallowing in toys/mess/rubbish are not happy ones!!

My children know if they smell bleach or hear the Hoover, Daddy's home!!!!!!! I let him tidy because he loves it so much.....me, I will be one of those mad old ladies with piles of newspapers everywhere.....
apparently there was a photo of my office in last weeks Health and Safety meeting.......
to finish, everyone except my dh seems quite happy with the situation...

this is all emotive stuff. I hate living in mess and squalour, but I also hate doing housework - and if you really want a clean tidy house and have two kids you end up tidying the whole time - which is just so boring and so not what I want my life to be. Also during mad tidying days I find I don't concentrate on the kids and am a pretty frustrated mother. the answer has to be having a cleaner twice a week or more - but then who can afford such a luxury? especially stay at home mums - so one income is paying for everything. I do take seriously the point though that I enjoy visiting a messy house (makes me feel better) and feel very uncomfortable visiting a very clean and tidy house (unless there are no children in which case it is a pleasure!). don't know where I am going with this, but it totally frustrates me that a nice clean tidy house is just an impossibility at this stage in my life, unless I become even more brain dead and clean the entire time. that's it.

extreme tidiness scares me (when i see it in other people's homes - i wouldn't mind a little bit in my house though...but nothing extreme)

Tidying the house whilst the kids are growing
Is like shovelling snow whilst it's still snowing.

I think u really have to find a happy medium and try and go wiht the flow, there not little for very long.

Well I've just registered with flylady so my new organised life starts tomorrow (so do the easter holidays - perhaps not the best time to start!)

Well myn house is a tip and my kids are miserable.

May be that's linked?

Actually, my house is incredibly hygienic (thank you dettol spray I love you), it's just buried somewhere under a pile of toys that gets shifted whenever we have time but that isn't often. My eldest is obsessivily tidy and my Hubby comes from a mum with OCD cleaning. And Mum In Law is way miserable- father in law left her coz couldnt take any more 6 am vaccuming (even on holiday).

Kids aren't miserable really- just joking!

Please someone,put me out of my misery. What the hell is 'Fly Lady'?

Its a website where you're taught to organise your home!! Think its gonna drive me mad esp over half term but worth a go!

Moondog, for your delectation...

flylady

I tidy up a lot as well. I find if too many toys are out she doesn't play properly, so she'll drag everything out and then the things she's concentrating on stay out and the others get put away so she focuses on only a few things. Or I put out some books, a jigsaw, a doll and the dolls bit like spare clothes, bottle, spoon etc. Then a while later when she's had enough, they get put away and I'll bring out her threading/beads, a toy car, and the dolls house and so on.

I am a really tidy person and can't chill when the place is wrecked and I I do think that it's better for her to just concentrate on a few toys at a time.

Nope - I have a really tidy house - I spend so much time tidying and cleaning and stressing about mess etc, I've got no time left to play with the kids and have a constant agitated look on my face all the time - hate myself and have a very demanding 5 year old who ALWAYS wants to play as a result!! Wish I could just relax, switch off and forget about perfection till they're 16 or so....

Thanks amylou and caligula. Now I know!!

soupdragon hits nail on head

I know of a family who have an alphabetical list of all their childrens toys on their computer. The children may select one toy each from the list and get this toy out and when they have finished with it the toy goes away and they can choose another. THIS TERRIFIES ME. Anal is not the word more like OCD in my view. My house is always a mess but I am of the opinion that when both my kids are at school full time then I can catch up with it all and not feel guilty about neglecting them to do the hoovering!

I've enjoyed this thread - had me laughing out loud during my lunchbreak at work. Colleagues now confirmed in thinking I'm mad.

Anyway, here's a few thoughts to chip in...

• I'm of the 'happy medium' school of thought. Our house is definitely not tidy or spotlessly clean. I have a cleaner who comes once a week so I know that the bathroom and kitchen are vaguely respectable (though she has a hard job finding the worksurfaces most weeks...) but otherwise, washing up is about as far as it goes. I'd much rather play than clean. Toys get cleared slightly at lunchtime and more properly at bedtime cos I can't stand all that rubble underfoot for 24hrs. I do also think DS plays better when he can see what he's got.

• I've noticed that DS (17 mo) is getting quite keen on clearing and tidying. He loves emptying the dishwasher (whilst mum's heart is in mouth) and wandering round with the dustpan and brush. He prefers this to all other toys. So plan to build on this. I think children like to copy parents and have roles in the house that they can complete and get praise for.

• if you're worried about accumulating too many (more) toys, how about joining a toy library? That way you can see what your child likes and dislikes, and also avoid buying some of the toys that are great for about three months and then discarded. Also useful to rotate toys - pack half away and swop round every few weeks.

Tidy people don't "neglect the kids to do the hoovering". DD gets involved in tidying with me and we treat it as part and parcel of playtime - my anal retentivness doesn't mean my kids get overlooked.

we have organised dd playroom today as it was becoming a tip and she is much happier. WE spent an hour playing cafe's with her and to be honest while the room was a tip she wasn't using it. I get stressed when the house is a tip and as someone else said happy mummy = happy child. However i think you can be too tidy, my hv diagnosed my post natal depression through my anally retentive immaculate house!

Somone asked before is it ever to late to become tidy. When i divorced my ex I became a real slattern as we were obsessively tidy, I used to have to iron the duvet after making the bed! So I rebelled for a while, however having had to work hard to get my own place I now want it to look nice, but housework and organisation are not something that comes naturally to me so I have had to work hard. I have a timetable for myself with jobs I want done by the end of the day to keep me on my toes.

i tried flylady but it drove me mad!

I tend not to do cleaning as such while dd is around, she is at nursery three afternoons. But I have started saying we will play for an hour and then mummy will tidy up for five minutes and I show her where the hands of the clock will be when I have finished.

I also find that if I give her a job to do .. normally polishing the bannisters of the stairs she is quite happy to let me get on with housework,

Everyone seems to be in agreement on this thread! We've just had a load of building work done and it really brought it home to me how horrific it is living in a completely upside down manner with kiddy in the house! Tidy is good - you can find stuff quickly, you can relax knowing spontaneous visitors aren't going to recoil in horror when they walk through the door and personally I find that having a moderately tidy house allows me to be more spontaneous with and devote more time to DD. PLUS I absolutely think that kids need to see the housework going on and participate in it as much as possible -hopefully this will teach responsibility, appreciation, domestic skills which seem pretty lacking in a lot of today's young and doing the chores is a great trade off for earning pocket money when they get older. And the more kids help out, the quicker stuff gets done and the more time there is to spend on fun family things.

Only talking about "tidy" though -there must be a limit to the number of times the hoover needs to come out in any one day!

you're all in agreement because we slobs are too ashamed of ourselves to put our hands up....

my house is always a mess. BUT it is a clean mess. sounds like an oxymoron i know. but basically, i dont stress about the toys being spread out, or everything being put back in its proper place. but i do stress about food being spilt, and crumbs, and basically dirt.
i know people who have houses that are perfectly tidied up, but whose bathrooms are vile, the insides of their cupboards look like the inside of a pyramid aafter four thousand years of neglect. whose toy containers have crumbs in them. icht. better stop ranting.

I reckon that there is a too much emphasis put on the word "tidy" - now if you were talking about "clean" and "safe" then I reckon you may have something. Whilst I recognise that it is difficult to be clean and safe if your home is messy all of the time, as long as it is tidied up regularly and given a good clean, there is no problem being abit messy IMHO. We aim to start each day and finish each day clean and tidy and not worry too much in the middle. Sure, we encourage the children to put away their own toys after playing with them but we just don?t get too stressed if the sittingroom becomes a treasure island with a pirate boat in the middle and their bedroom turns into a pink shiny puddle of plastic jewellry, feathers and wands. Life is too short and we all have enough really important things to feel guilty about.

I agree entirely with what you said-just wanted to see how other people lived!!

bathmummy, I think you have it spot on! Yes hygiene and safety is important (from someone who spent am at A & E after ds3 learned to climb out of cot in middle of night!), but you can get too hung up on it- I like to have time to relax, and to do things too that are immensely messy like papier mache stuff.