Dirty Clothes and Hunger Cries

All you diligent teens with only a bedroom to worry about can listen in today and prepare for the future.

Real life means household overseers cannot spend all their time tweaking strategic room cleaning plans no matter how much fun time trials are. Within a few days, someone will need clean socks and within a few hours everyone will need warm food.

Clearly, laundry and food preparation have a say in all this cleaning process business. So today they get a brief word.

First, if you handle all the laundry in your home, laundry has to be part of your routine cleaning plan. I just advise it become a temporary phase rather than a lifelong commitment. I read recently that the new candy-like laundry packets are, in part, a result of men helping more around the house (a good thing) and women being hesitant to relinquish clothing control for fear it won’t be done to their satisfaction (a bad thing). My opinion is that laundry, along with personal bedroom maintenance, should be one of the first tasks to apprentice out.

Our laundry process went from me doing it all (ages and ages ago) to cycling through children doing the family laundry a week at a time, to each person doing their own laundry at assigned times during the week.

This means that since well before the 21st century dawned, I have only done laundry for my husband and me. I attached it to my bedroom routine. Putting laundry in the washer is a true mechanical maid project: the machine doing the work while other things happen. Folding happens during the morning bedroom time. And yes, we have from time to time chosen socks and t-shirts from a basket for several days, but normally it is a smooth system.

Food preparation is an entire area unto itself, but unlike laundry which can be attached to another routine cleaning module, food preparation is the area to which routine kitchen cleaning modules can be attached. As much as possible use food preparation time to also attend to routine kitchen tasks. Are you waiting for water to boil? Clean the sink or the microwave. Wipe spots from the floor. Straighten one row of spices. Empty the dishwasher. Trying one of those thirty minute dinner recipes? See if you can also fit  five minutes of cleaning in with the food prep.

With ten people in the family, two kitchen rules were imperatives: empty the dishwasher before eating, and clear your own area. When company came, usually the designated supper person took over the traditional clearing the table for the guests, but on regular nights, with everyone clearing their area, the supper person only had to put away food, wipe counters and wash pots and pans. This can spread to everyone cleaning up together till the kitchen is done, the best process of all. Eating together, cleaning up together. Talking all the while. Accrued benefits, profitable inefficiencies, and dovetailing all in one fell swoop. The Lord certainly knew what He was doing when He built us to get hungry several times a day.

Too often we act like laundry, meal preparation, and cleaning are intrusions to the important things of life. Soccer, piano practicing, report writing, and nuclear research are not more important than these cornerstones of living. They require adequate, not exorbitant time, so embrace them. Don’t think you are mistreated because washing clothes or wiping counters are part of your life. They are elements of civilized living and will be with you, and with your children, for the rest of your lives, or until an apocalypse sends us back to scrub boards and berry foraging. Don’t complain. The more efficient, consistent, thorough, thoughtful, and congenial everyone can be doing the tasks, the more accrued benefits there will be over the years.

So as you work through your routine cleaning plan, experiment with incorporating laundry into the mix. And as you prepare meals, intentionally plan to attend to some of your routine kitchen cleaning tasks in the course of daily food preparation.