Sharing The Chores

There was no way I could keep up with cleaning and management of the household while healing my body.  I enjoy living in a simplistic and clean home.  My ideal living environment would be a totally Zen'd out open floor plan with very little stuff.  The few pieces of furniture and things would be functional and art pieces with meaning.

Since I live in a three bedroom, one bath Ranch with my husband and triplets, I'll settle for clean and organized.  It became quite painful and exhausting, trying to keep up with the accumulating stuff.  There's the dirty dishes, laundry, dust, school bags, shoes, mail, projects (mostly mine), electronics with cords for charging and the ever floating remotes.  Aarrrggggggh!

I've adopted a new phrase, Divide and Conquer.  Now, I don't think the original intention of that phrase has anything to do with creating a livable home, but that's how I'm going to define it.  Everyone pitches in…well almost everyone, but I'll get back to that later.

Everyone knows what they are responsible for when it comes to upkeep of our home.  My son has dishes on Sunday's, my youngest daughter has dishes on Mondays, Ray does them on Tuesdays and so on.  Some of the chores are specifically done for the weekly allowance and some are done because we all must pitch in to keep a nice home.  So that brings me back to the comment about…well almost everyone.  My son is saving up for a laptop for High School and my oldest daughter doesn't like chores, so they both capitalized on their situations.  He does her chores and gets her allowance.  Everyone's happy.

What I didn't expect from all of us contributing our gifts, talents and time to creating a nice space to live in, was the shift in everyone's actions.  We are using less dishes, every day, because no one likes to do them.  The less they use, the fewer dishes we have.  Cups are being reused throughout the day, a sandwich needs no plate and my son has joked about trying to figure out how to not dirty something for soup.  The family members are putting there things away more often than not because they may be the person chosen to clean that room on Saturday.  The leftovers in the fridge are being eaten more often now because no one wants to cook with a pan…it would have to be washed.

We have turned out to be a Reuse, Reduce, Recycle family.  I'm so proud of us!!!  Now, if I could get them all to help me build a tiny home from all recycled materials, that'd be awesome!

Thanks for reading, forwarding and following!!!
Terri