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This is  the final part 8 of our series –managing a large family.  Saturday and Sunday are for family time

Come the weekends, these are times we dedicate to our family time.  I do not schedule any special cleaning chores on these days.  We do our basic everyday chores but that is it.  We leave these days free for family outings, bigger projects with Dad, and any personal projects we might want to spend the day doing.  I never plan on anything for the weekend.  We just go with the flow and see what happens.

My husband is a visionary man who likes to get up and go sometimes.  I as his wife, have learned the blessings of being able to grab the diaper bag, some sandwiches and be out the door for the whole day.  We enjoy being together, park time is our favorite thing to do.

Sometimes on Saturdays my husband will need us to go do some running into town for parts for our business.  We typically all go together and if I didn’t plan ahead for dinner, we might end up eating dinner out.  Which for our family can get quite costly.  I like to plan easy put together meals for this day.  Nachos, tacos, homemade pizza, easy meals like that are quick to put together and usually require no planning ahead to make.

For Sunday meals, I like to make a heartier meal.  I plan on making salsibury steak, cheeseburger meatloaf, or chicken dinners.

The weekends are spent together learning and growing with one another.

I hope you have enjoyed our series, Managing a large family.  Be sure to check out the other entries if you missed any of them.

This is part 7 of our series –managing a large family.

 

Friday is our cleaning day

This is our day to get our big cleaning done.  This is done by all of the children.  There is something for every age to help with.  I like to get up in the morning, do our regular everyday chores, personal grooming, and then begin with our Friday chores.

I have stated before on Monday we get most of our laundry done, but by today our piles have grown.  I typically start early to get all of the laundry finished up by afternoon time.

Here is our list that we have in a plastic sleeve, placed on our wall clip boards.

[gview file=”https://plainandnotsoplain.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/Friday.pdf”]

As you can see at the top left hand side are our chores that we do every Friday.  The boys take care of the yard and outside work.  Then we have our chores broken down into sections based upon the weeks.  If it is the first week of the month, we do week 1 chores.  I try and focus on a different room of the house each week and then we do a deep clean based on what is stated.

The chores are various in skill.  It is nice to be able to hand a magic eraser to a 4 year old and have them rid the walls of crayon markings, while an older one is wiping the dirt marks off of the wall.

I even scheduled the 5th week of the month, which happens about every 3 months.  I think our basement becomes a “catch-all” for items.  I dedicated this week to going through and throwing out or giving away items that we no longer need.  There is no sense in holding onto items that could be used for someone else’s benefit.

For today’s dinner menu I will schedule a crockpot dish to make.  I can throw this in early in the morning and then let it cook all day long while we are doing our work.   The blessings of having  a crock pot.

By having this schedule, my whole house gets clean every month.  I never have to write down, remove the crayon marking off of the walls.  Because I know that some time during the month, we are scheduled to do that.  Same thing for finding a mess elsewhere in your home.  Know that you have it scheduled to be deep cleaned sometime during the month.  This was a big part of keeping my sanity in my home.  I would do a yearly “spring” and “fall” cleaning of my home.  But throughout the year I would start to see things get bad and I would just clean them like crazy.  Then it seems a few more months would go by and I would be sick of seeing markings on my walls so we would dedicate a week to deep cleaning the whole house.  Only to mess it up again and have to repeat this cycle.

I have found that by using this scheduling method, it allows me to know that things will get done, it may not be today or tomorrow but sometime they are scheduled to get cleaned.  I like it, it gives me a piece of mind.

Having this way of managing my home has given me the ability to stay organized.  I used to think I was organized and then I would have these times throughout the year where I would feel like I was getting behind in everything and that my house was becoming all unorganized.  I would spend about a week cleaning and organizing things.  I no longer feel that way.  I realized that I WAS NOT as organized as I thought I was.  Now I can really say that I feel I have managed my family the best way that I know how.  I am ALWAYS open to suggestions and improvement in any areas of our lives.

 

Up next….the weekend