Making a home with and for children
Plus a product roundup, which everyone loves
We got back from a recent trip, and as we were unloading the minivan, my eldest took off his shoes and sat on the entry bench and took a deep inhale.
“It feels so good to be home,” he said.
I thrilled to hear this simple statement, because this is the emotion about our home that I want to generate in my children.
I want home to be a place where they feel safe, inspired, motivated; where they feel capable of inventing and exploring; where they know their place as contributors to our home economy; and where they can find themselves, again and again.
Homemaking goals in this messy season
When I think about what I want my home to be, especially with young children, these four goals rise to the surface:
A home that invites curiosity and open-ended play, especially for little ones.
A home that feels safe and welcoming, to our children but also to anyone who visits, of any age.
A home that is beautiful, filled with art and furnishings that please the eye and create a sense of calm and hospitality. (Note that this does not mean an expensive or large home. A studio apartment with beige carpet can fulfill this goal!)
A home that is free of clutter and as clean as reasonably possible.
Because of this, I think a lot about housekeeping, as you know, and what it means to create an environment for young children.
Working outside of the home, I spend a lot of my free time when I am home cleaning and organizing. Like all the working moms I know, much discipline is required to keep up with the house, because I’m not there 40 hours a week. Banishing clutter remains a top task. Cluttered spaces create stress and chaos. Clutter increases our levels of cortisol and makes us feel, properly, a little bit insane. Kids, however, are clutter-generators, so it’s a Sisyphean task, but one that I have come to experience handling with a degree of joy.
Here are some of the not-novel and unsurprising ways I tackle the mess of children, some things that make it a little easier, and some practices we keep to involve the kids in the work of the home.
Combined, all of these things have made housekeeping with three kids 5 and under more joyful.
FEEDING
Favorite Gear for Feeding
Stokke Tripp Trapp chairs: Worth the investment. These chairs last forever, grow with your kid, and look like real furniture. We have two, which are used now for Lucy and Felix, and I imagine we’ll still keep them for many years yet.
Gathre mats to place under high chairs. The amount of food on our floors on a daily basis is incredible. This is when I miss having a dog the most. But these mats make clean up easier and protect floors well.
Mushie plates and bowls come in a bunch of nice, millennial-mom colors, and they’re durable and easy to wash.
Sleeved bibs (like so, Lucy modeling a variation above) have proven helpful during this truly disgusting infant-feeding stage, but we also have a stash of silicone bibs for the toddler stage, which are easy to clean.
Favorite Chores for Feeding
Food-related chores are often where we start with the kids. Right now, Moses is responsible for unloading the silverware every morning and setting the table for each family meal, and Felix is responsible for loading the silverware after meals and fetching kid bowls/plates before meals.
Accordingly, I put all of the kid dishes in a low cabinet that the boys can reach without help.
The boys also love “helping” with most cooking tasks, which we encourage when there’s time. A learning tower and a simple folding step stool have made this easier, and kid aprons have also made it more enticing for them.
We apparently raised fastidious eaters who FREAK OUT if they get food on themselves (?? I dunno, I don’t hate it), and so wiping up is a big deal. We keep a ceramic dish of semi-gross daily rags on the counter that Moses can now reach to clean himself, his brother, and their places after eating.
PLAYING
Favorite Gear for Organizing Play
Book storage is an important system in our household, as you may expect.
Ikea wall shelves are mounted in the boys’ room, which I love for (1) saving floor space, (2) displaying the pretty covers of picture books, and (3) letting them more easily see and reach the books themselves. Sadly, it doesn’t look like Ikea is selling these anymore, but the ones we have resemble these.
Sturdy fabric bins for storing books in the living room (shown below). Recently purchased these and have been happy with how they look and how much they hold. Swapped them out for some wicker bins that were splintering and ending up in tiny shards in the baby’s mouth.
A small but more spacious cheap Target shelf (shown below) resides in our basement to house the full library of kid books.
This Lego bin with a blanket for easy clean-up thrills me to no end. The boys also get excited about helping put it away.
Baskets and bins to corral things on a shelf. Not a novel concept! I am not that orderly about what goes in a bin at the end of the day, because it’s faster to just hoover everything up into one receptacle (and direct the boys accordingly). Just get it out of sight and contained.
Favorite Chores and Tips with Play
Clean up what you were playing with before you pull out something else is a big rule in our household. Grateful it’s also reinforced at their Montessori school.
“Lightning round” is a concept that was used often in my family, in which Mom sets a timer and everyone has to pick up everything as fast as they can. Make it a race! Things are usually thrown with too much violence for my taste, but at least they’re in the bin!
Toy and book rotations are also important for (1) preserving my sanity and (2) keeping things exciting and fresh, without this need to buy them new things. We have a fully stocked kid library in the basement (shown above), and I routinely rotate books from the boys’ room and the living room with new books from the basement. Likewise, we do a “toy swap” where the boys get to choose which toys they want to put away and pick out “new” toys to play with from the closet. For the sake of clutter and novelty, I’m against having everything out all the time, so this has proven to be a useful system.
CLOTHING
Favorite Gear for Maintaining Clothes
Big plastic Target bins lids, labeled with washi tape with the age, organize all of the many clothes, as I am saving the hand-me-downs that survive Moses for Felix and Lucinda. Again, not revolutionary, but a big improvement from what I was previously doing (using big fabric bags, which were so heavy and did not stack, and plus were permeable to odor, pests, etc.).
Moms gotta be good at laundry. I have an arsenal of stain treatment favorites, including:
The Laundress Stain Solution (seems to remove almost everything with very minimal effort) and the Puracy Stain Remover (also effective) are my go-to options for spot treatment.
For our normal daily wash, my favorite powdered detergent (Nellie’s) with a dash of Oxiclean gets almost everything back to working order.
The sun! Having a drying rack outside, even in the winter, can treat a multitude of stains (especially baby poo).
My other big habit shift is to keep my stain treatment in little decanted bottles in the kitchen (where the majority of our stains occur), not in the laundry room (which for us is in the basement).
Favorite Chores and Habits for Maintaining Clothes
Doing daily laundry. Do a load every day. We live and die by this rule.
Designating a bin for kids’ clothes to donate or consign helps me stay on top of clothing management and identify what they may need for the next season as they grow out of things.
Involving the boys in laundry, such as teaching them how to fold their clothes and put them away once they are folded, has been a helpful chore at this age and stage.
CLEANING
Favorite Kid-Friendly Cleaning Tools
The aforementioned folding step-stool is a game-changer for tight spaces and small bathrooms, which we have. We have two of these cheap folding stools, which our boys use daily in the bathroom as well as in the kitchen when helping with chores.
A small spray bottle is such a great enticement to little helpers. They really get into it. I ask them to help clean windows, mirrors, and bathroom surfaces with a water-vinegar mixture and then beg them to stop spraying, that’s quite enough, thank you very much, everything is getting very clean, yes, put the spray bottle down and back away slowly.
A new thing I’m into: wipe boxes and travel containers in which to decant baby wipes. I dunno why this matters to me; it just improves the user experience. The travel bags in particular have been wonderful to have on hand in every bag, stashed in the minivan, and so forth.
Favorite Kid-Friendly Cleaning Tasks
Baby wipes on the baseboards: Give those babies a baby wipe and ask them to clean the baseboards. Whoever gets the dirtiest, dustiest wipe wins!
Cleaning windows: I use the E-cloth window cleaning cloths, which are magic, and some water. The kids love helping with this.
Sweeping with a hand broom and dust pan. No, it’s not very effective for actually cleaning your floors, but it’s a fun activity.
Whenever they come inside, take shoes off and put them in the shoe baskets.
At the end of the school day, they also have to unpack their backpacks, hang up jackets, and put lunch boxes in the kitchen by the sink before they can do anything else.
On My To-Do List
Involving the boys in more dangerous chores! I saw a video of someone’s New England 4-year-old, in a tiny Fair Isle wool sweater, chopping wood with a real axe, and my first thought was just, YES. Even though we no longer have a functional fireplace, our boys need to learn how to do this. I like that Montessori principles adhere to this as well, giving toddlers knives and scissors and expecting them to learn how to handle dangerous things from a very young age. We can do more of that at home. Raise the expectations of competency. Raise children who are anti-fragile.
Building more rhythms and expectations around outdoor chores and work to support the house and garden. We’re entering a quieter season for that, but I want to plan well for chores for the late winter and spring.
Creating more routines of daily work, so there aren’t as many complaints and questions. For example, the boys expect their regular morning chores, and so they don’t (usually) resist doing them. But if we ask them to do something new, there is (sometimes) resistance. We need to work harder at making work a regular part of family life for all members.
Modeling that housework is not gendered. There are things Dad is better at and does (cooking, fixing, assembling), and there are things Mom is better at and does (organizing, laundering, cleaning). Boys should help in housework just as much as girls.
Expressing daily to our children how housework is a privilege and a joy, to take care of what we have, to create an environment together that we get to share. It is not drudgery. It is not punishment.
What chores and routines work for your household? I want to give my boys more work! Share your thoughts.
I am hesitant to send this, knowing that there is nothing new or novel here. Just an assemblage of random routines that help our household function. This is where I am, in a drowsy November, looking ahead to the crush of the holidays, padding around my home and wondering what to optimize and how to put these little people to work. xoxo