Any other mums fed up with mess and constant cleaning?

[poshsinglemum]

It is constant.

DD is adorable but i am drained by the constant mess;

Crumbs on the carpet after ever meal and snacks.

Piles of dirty laundry and no drier.

Washing up as tend to cook from scratch.

Mould on window sills.

Nappy bin always seems full. Ditto rubbish bins.

Also dd goes in rubbish bin and pulls out plastic bottles, tea bags etc.

Finger prints on sofa.

Bathroom.

The house never sems to stay tidy,

Is this normal and how can i keep on top of it? I've no man to help out

Feel free to add your own gripes.

Oh yes- TOYS!

DD has just gone to bed. Downstairs looks like a toy bomb has exploded. There is a large stack of washing up to do. I don't even want to think about the crumbs and fingermarks. DH is working away until Christmas, so I do understand why you feel fed up.

To add to my misery, DD is only 19 months but is refusing to have a daytime nap. I am recovering from a double whammy of glandular fever and a cold. She might not have needed a nap today but I really did .

My solution is to ignore whatever I can't deal with. The washing up will be done tonight because I would hate to see it in the morning. I will clear away any toys that are in the way and do a quick sweep to get up the crunmbs (thank god for wood floors).

My solution to the piles of washing - I have 2 large laundry baskets. In other words, I hide it!

For the bathroom, I use Method flushable wipes for a quick once over.

My only other suggestion is to pick one room a day to tidy / clean. I aim to spend no more than 30 minutes on housework a day.

Finally, my house is still a tip. But if I can live with it then I think it is OK. If anyone else has a problem with it, well I am happy to show them where I keep my cleaning stuff!

I sometimes look at the mess under dd's highchair and want to cry.

i agree, it is groundhog day. the constant weary grind of wiping cleaning hoovering- and as you clear a room it gets messed again.over and over every day until you go mad. my solution is gin and mumsnet.

Oh God, yes! I can't believe how many times a day I can remove yicky bits of semi-chewed food from unexpected places and yet still make NO impact on the squalor... and that is not even going into the toys, the piles of ironing, the drying infant clothing on every radiator, the items that I seem to dislodge every time I so much as breathe and the things I have had to abandon quickly and never seem to get back to (my lunch/any coffee/speculative kiss from DH)...

And I have this uncomfortable feeling it's just going to get worse...

YES.

Declared the living room a NO TOY ZONE and banned toys to the playroom/bedrooms.

We start doing a clean up together at 7pm, and hour before bed time.

And I nag constantly.

YES.

Declared the living room a NO TOY ZONE and banned toys to the playroom/bedrooms.

We start doing a clean up together at 7pm, and hour before bed time.

And I nag constantly.

I feel your pain. Am hoping that, if we move at some point in the future, I can have one room that is a tiny-people free zone.

In my daydreams, it is clean and beautifully tidy, with a fabulously comfy chair in it, and I can escape there at the end of the day. I can then sit in it and pretend that the bombsite that is the rest of the house is someone elses. Lovely

TBH, if I got my finger out a bit more and did a little less MNing, the mess probably wouldn't be so bad

I think that the way to get through it is to see it as a temporary phase, it will not always be like this.

The other thing is to relax your standards a bit. (Or get a cleaner I wish)

I've never been the tidiest person but since becoming a mum I've started to get nesty and that means I want a lovely home. Oh the irony of it!

I guess having a lovely home is one that's filled with love and laughter rather than a spotless but frosty one!

I guess it's just the bits of food that gets me down!

Oh it gets worse (or at least doesn't get any better)
Different crap, same mess.
I am quite anal about cleaning, but working virtually full time have had to lower my standards.
As long as the bathrooms/kitchen floor are clean- I don't really care. I haven't dusted since September

I have a man, but he's not much help with housework...
My standards aren't that high though. Bathroom gets done, kitchen tidied, toys tidied away (mostly). Washing yes, ironing.. well...
There's always clutter, and lots of dust!
My friend gave me the number of her cleaner, but I've not rung yet due to the aforementioned clutter!

I am utterly fed up too. Have found acquisition of Eubank carpet sweeper (much quicker than dragging hoover out every time) helped with perpetual crumb-plague. I don't iron. Nothing else to add, except my enduring sympathy...

yu gi oh,pokemon and match attack cards.....every bloody where!!

am single mum to 5,2 of which are teenagers,so add amateur make up disasters to the above""

oh god tell me about it.... im sick of it.

Ds has only just dropped off to sleep so now the taks of cleaning begins. I think i have about 2hours worth ahead of me but it has to be done.... the house is vile.

my 2 are only small so mke loads of mess but cant tidy it up.... of the joys of being aa single mum. I need to cloan myself.

Yes Yes Yes! - I actually had a mini, foot stamping paddy in DD's room earlier when I went in to put her clean clothes away and it looked like there had been a toy explosion in there.

It must have been a good paddy though because DH went in and cleaned it up without being asked.

Yes, yes and yes. And everyone else's house that I go to always seems so clean and tidy even when I pick up from a playdate. I get depressed about it and keep telling myself it is not important in the grand scheme of things. I even stop myself from asking people round because I am so embarrassed by the mess. I need to get a grip though.

God yes, the constant mess is soul destroying! I can remember Life Before Kids where the only "mess" was magazines, coffee cups, stuff we left around for a day or two. We had cream sofas ffs!

Now I'm sitting on a sofa whose arm is shiny as a result of having an entire pot of vaseline rubbed into it, and dots of jam and fingerpaint. He's drawn on every downstairs wall and yesterday he swung from the roman blind and broke it. Morsels of toast lurk in every corner and I have 6 months worth of faintly smelly paperwork to sort through because he emptied out two massive files all over the livingroom and sprinkled them with milk.

Most of which was done when I was attempting to clean another room!

"I've no man to help out"

I've a man that makes more mess than my two DS's, that goes to work () and so couldn't possibly put the coffee back in the cuboard/make the bed/replace the empty loo roll after using the last bit/empty the bin/put his fucking shoes in the DESIGNATED SHOE CUBOARD

I don't know where to begin. The perpetrators are both sleeping now, thank goodness.

I have four messy children and a clutter collecting dh. I am drowning in mess and constantly in motion trying to get on top of it and failing miserably.

It's the bane of my life.

Swimming through treacle.
I spent the morning tidying the kitchen while dd3 aged 15 months was setting out my afternoons work by emptying tampax into the toilet and her brothers toys into the bath.
I've spent the evening ironing as we need the laundry dining room next week as it is ds's birthday.
It is constant. However much I do there is more, so much more.

Is there anything you can do relatively easily to prevent some of the mess in the first place?

We put nappies straight in the wheely bin outside, or if it's raining, just on the doorstep in a covered bin (to be dealt with after DS' bedtime). We have our main household bin in a room that DS has no access to, and a second kitchen bin in a small caddy on the kitchen worktop - I use a supermarket carrier bag as a bin-bag and empty it every day. It's great for teabags, veg peelings etc.

I used to be a bit more stringent about this, but have relaxed standards recently, but all snacks not taken at the table are eaten from a plastic bowl (biscuits and the like), and when finished (whether the food has all been eaten or not) the bowl goes on the worktop, out of reach.

We have a mini dyson that is absolutely awesome for spilled crumbs and hoovering under DS' chair at mealtimes. I know it's pricey, but it's worth a million of the crappy dustbusters! I usually let any soggy food (pasta and the like) dry before hoovering it up, as it's much easier, then it just needs a normal vacuum once a week.

We also have a couple of crates for toys - in theory, one is for general toys, and one for duplo/cars, but they all end up going in together. In theory, all the toys go in here at the end of the day - this is something DS is involved with.

Sorry just re-read my post and realised how preachy it sounds!

My house is usually an absolute state, and I have to do the above stuff to keep my head above water!

I find the best way of stopping DS from getting in to everything is just to hide it from view - either in a cupboard, or out of reach. Things like books, CDs and DVDs are wedged so tightly on their shelves that I can barely get them out, let alone him!

I know what you mean about taking measures to prevent mess Naetha, it's do-able when you're feeling on top of things but a lot of the time it's like shovelling snow in a blizzard in our house.

Like today I was bringing him in some juice and a muffin when I noticed he'd smeared all that vaseline all over the sofa, and by the time I'd gone back in the kitchen to get stuff to scrape/clean off the vaseline he'd poured his drink on the sofa, and was in the process of crumbling the muffin into the wet patch. Then as I tried to deal with that he ran and washed his vaseliney hands in my lemonade, knocking it all over himself, the table and my trainers, so then he needed changing.

There's really only so much preparation and second guessing you can do with a toddler, they're so unpredictable! If I gave ds a plastic bowl with a snack in, he'd empty out the snack and use the bowl as a hat while he smushed the food into the furnishings.