Today my plan was to post about our super-duper-nature-journal-making-and-using home school group activity that I was scheduled to host, but it had to be canceled because poor Ian threw up 4 times last night (in the toilet! hooray!) and it was 40 degrees with thunder and hail outside.  So on to plan B.

Since I posted about our new magnet board I’ve actually had quite a few people e-mail me with questions about our job chart.  You must understand that I am not a very good housekeeper.  I am completely organizationally challenged, inconsistent, and naturally a slob.  I love things to be neat and organized, to be clean and sparkly, but making myself do actual cleaning and organizing has been one of my life long struggles.  Fortunately I married a saint who has self discipline in spades.  I have improved on my house keeping skills a lot since we got married and I’ve matured and realized how much I really do like order, but I’ve certainly got a long way to go.

First off– it’s just a magnetic dry-erase board.  I used printable magnet sheets I found at Office Max to print the words on which I designed with Pages, our desktop publishing program on our Mac.

Any system we have to keep our house in order around here has to be really simple.  There are a few things the kids are expected to do every morning– get dressed, make beds, and pick up clothes and toys off of their floors.  I have to reiterate these expectations on a near daily basis.  That and the rule NO READING BEFORE BREAKFAST.  Every morning the 3 big kids work together to unload the dishwasher and then as the day goes on everyone rinses and loads their own dishes.  The dishwasher, not the sink or counter, is the dirty dish receptacle.

A couple of times a day (at roughly 12 and 4) we do a “clean up” where everyone works as hard as they can for 10 minutes to pick up and tidy the main floor rooms of the house.  This helps me relax a bit about the inevitable mess of having 5 kids home all day because I know they’ll help get it under control.

Then evening rolls around and that is where the job chart comes in.  The kids rotate helping with dinner clean-up on weekdays.  The dinner chores are the only ones on the chart that consistently get done.  Laundry is on there, but it is just one of those battles I haven’t figured out how to fight quite yet.  (I did try Jessica’s once a week laundry day thing for about 4 weeks, but I just couldn’t do ALL the laundry a family of 7 produces, do school, and make meals in one day.  I have yet to find something I can really stay on top of.)

On Saturdays Barry helps the kids really clean their rooms before anyone can go downstairs in morning and the bathroom chores rotate between kids each week.  So, whoever has mirrors cleans all the mirrors in all the bathrooms, whoever has toilets cleans all 3 toilets (and the surrounding floor), and the counters person does all the sinks and counters in all 3 bathrooms.  Sometimes I’ll make a list of chores that REALLY need to be done in addition to those and we all work on those too.  Vacuuming just gets done when it looks like we need to (which is a few times a week in the main rooms because we have a big dog who SHEDS).  Our sliding glass door is covered in fingerprints and dog-nose prints more often than not.  We’re lucky if dusting gets done once a month.

This helps us get all the necessities done for health and basic decluttering, but our house is by no means spic and span.  I seriously could spend hours everyday cleaning, but I don’t want to, and I really don’t think I need to.  There will be a season when I’ll miss all the mess makers and won’t even remember the mess.  Right now I’m just striving for peace and order, with as little effort as possible.

And I try really, really hard not to compare myself and my home to my friend’s who are obsessively neat and clean with perfectly arranged living rooms and decorated walls.

I usually feel pretty good about where I’m at.