when I straighten up (ie put away) my 1 year old daughter’s toys, she thinks that she is not allowed to play with them. (no, that isn’t a rule or a punishment, she come up with that on her own)

when i leave any of them outfor her to play with ALL of them are strewn throughout the house for me to trip over!

No answers just my own quandry.

But I’m much more concerned about clutter than cleanliness…

my .02 Not everybody is a “sanitary is non-negotiatable” type.

I think it’s up to the individual family to decide how much time they dedicate to tidiness.
Because I like to be fairly neat, but don’t want to dedicate too much family time to the issue, I’ve worked out an arrangement that works quite nicely for my family (I have two small children). I allow myself ONLY 20 minutes after the kids are in bed to tidy up the house by picking-up/organizing clutter. It’s amazing what can be accomplished when I dedicate myself to cleaning during that time. Anything I don’t finish in that time just doesn’t get done that day (Although some days I finish before the 20 is up). Then once every two weeks, usually on a Sat. or Sun., my husband takes the kids out of the house for a fun one or two hour “excursion” while I clean. We have a moderate size home and I am able to clean it fairly quickly by using one all-purpose cleaner in the bathrooms and kitchen and using a swiffer mop and duster. My husband enjoys the alone time with the kids and I can be much more efficient.

It’s pretty easy to keep the house clean this way and I think we are all a little more relaxed.

Jon

I am by no means a neat freak, but I do like things to be reasonably clean and orderly. I am probably more into the visual appearance of order — I can handle dust as long as things *look* tidy.

Some of my kids, and my husband, are natural born slobs. My littlest one is very neat, she is the sort who will put her toys away without being asked. The other two couldn’t care less about tidying up. My husband doesn’t care at all.

I struggle with finding the balance between enforcing everyone’s responsibilities to pick up their toys, put their clothes in the hamper, clean up their messes, etc., and not being a demanding shrew-mother. I don’t have a clear idea of what “normal” is because my childhood was clearly rather abnormal. So I sort of alternate between slacking off and being quite relaxed, then freaking out about the mess and turning into a screaming banshee until it is cleaned up.

I am pretty good about clutter. In fact, I have a reputation for throwing EVERYTHING out, including stuff we need! Whenever I visit my mother, I come home and start tossing stuff right and left. I just do not want to ever end up like her.

I certainly am in a better frame of mind when things are tidy. Trouble is, with a bunch of young children, everything tends towards entropy pretty quickly. Perhaps it will change as they get older, but I suspect I will always struggle to some extent between my slovenly streak and my inner neatnik.

Shalom Rav!

Then I read Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis. Among many other helpful things, he says that worrying about how your home appears to guests is the kind of Pride that is a Deadly Sin. That blew my mind! As I struggle to let go of that–to keep the house in a state that pleases me and my family, resist apologizing for it, and stop judging myself and others on the basis of housekeeping–I am becoming more and more aware of how wrong and twisted it was and how it impaired my experience of hospitality.

I’m not saying everyone who keeps a clean house does it out of sinful pride! Just something to think about.

I have 3 kids age 5, 3, and 1. A “neat” husband. I came into marriage with almost no domestic skills. I actually did not know how to make spaghetti! I spent my life preparing for being in the working world, so finding myself in the new stay-at-home mom world has been a real challenge in humility.

The “cleaning” issue, has really been more about internalizing the virtue of “order.” It’s tempting to look at time spent cleaning as “time not spent reading to my kids” or being a “good” mother. (Not to mention less fun than writing my novel.) Housekeeping is not high on my “fun” list.

Yet because it’s a struggle, its the time I feel the MOST spiritual during the day. When I do laundry, (which is every day since we are struggling to master the art of potty training) I think about the sacraments of baptism and confession. I offer up the grossest, poop filled parts of my day to Jesus, and imagine that he does to my soul what I do physically for our smelly, messy clothes.

When I clean up the toys my kids rooms, I pray for them. It’s a quiet time at the end of the day while their Dad gives them a bath in the next room. I can hear my kids laughing in the tub. As I rearrange all the various toys in places where they can find them tomorrow, I pray.

Cleaning, for me, is not fun. It’s not immediately rewarding. (Home-schooling is more about “the joys I imagined I’d do as a mother when I was pregnant with my first-born.”) But their are these huge rewards for doing the humble, hard work of creating a beautiful space for your family.

Last week, my father in law had a health emergency. I had to get a family of 5 out the door in two hours, all while supporting my husband and saying many Hail Marys for my Dad to survive in the ICU. We were half-way through our car trip, before I realized how blessed I was to have kept up with all the boring, daily maintenance of housework. If we hadn’t had clean laundry, I hadn’t know exactly where the swim suits were hanging, and the sippy cups drying, and where the diaper cream had landed, and all 700 other necessities for all five people, we could not have gotten out of the door.

A clean house, helps my family do their jobs “better” as Catholics. It helps us respond faster to calls from the sick. It helps us be more open to the practice of Christian hospitality. A clean house, even helps us pray the rosary better at night.

My house never approach “model house” clean. But God has used the tasks of cleaning to make me more in tune with his divine virtues of patience, self-sacrifice and order.