Kitchen Routines

I blogged about Kitchen Routines here and also am posting it here to maybe get a good discussion going about what other moms do to manage their house and specifically their kitchens.

Mom Management part I

Holly Pierlot’s, A Mother’s Rule of Life: How to Bring Order to Your Home and Peace to Your Soul, reminds me how important a daily routine or rhythm is in a mother’s day. As a mom of three young and unpredictable children, it’s important for me to be flexible and try and find a balance between being too controlling or too lax. I also have to be humble and realistic of what I can truly expect of myself and of my children and husband when it comes to establishing routines around the house.

I love our home. We’ve been here just about two years and every time I drive up to it or away from it I smile and thank God for blessing us with the home we have to grow in and love together as a family. As much as I love our home, I still have a hard time managing the responsibilities that inevitably come with home ownership. Pierlot reminds me though that our home and each room in the house needs to meet a two-fold purpose: It must be functional and beautiful.

Now for me I have to take that a little further and add that it should be functional, beautiful (at least to us), and ‘baby-proof’. I could decorate with all sorts of beautiful things for our home but many decorative items I’d prefer to dress my home up with would last maybe ten minutes before getting broken, marked on, or taken hostage in one of the many toy baskets around the house. So I try to remember that this season will pass and one day I’ll be able to set out an exquisitely fragile decorative plate and potpourri-filled metal balls next to the coffee table books full of beautiful pictures of faraway lands.

Recently, I gathered with other Catholic moms to discuss our homes and ways to keep them functional and beautiful despite our children (and, ahem, our husbands). Following the advice of the Fly Lady and Holly, we did a room analysis and wrote down a list of all the rooms in our homes. Thinking about the purpose of each room, we then noted the chores that needed to be done in each room including the when and the who for each, and also jotted down a list of any repairs or improvements that the room needed.

So in this Mom Managment part I (this does not guarantee a part II btw) I’m thinking about my kitchen:

The purpose of my kitchen is to provide a space to store and prepare food. It is also a place to eat and clean items associated with cooking and eating. In my kitchen we also do a lot of our artwork between meals.

So one thing that needs to done daily in the kitchen to maintain somewhat of an order is the dishes and dishwasher. Ideally the dishes would be cleaned, dried, and put away after each meal and before the next. Ideally, my children would each help in this process or at least leave me alone while I did it. But since they can’t really scrub and dry all the dishes safely quite yet I adjust my goals.

After each meal, the older two put their plates by the sink and their placemats are brushed off and put away. If the dishwasher is ready to be unloaded, they help put the utensils and plastic plates and cups away. I have them help as they can, even if it’s just entertaining the baby while I do it all. My husband would rather be tortured I think that have to do the dishes so as long as the baby is happy he gets kid duty after dinner while I get lost in soap suds and thoughts about future blog posts. Before going to bed at night I try and leave the kitchen as clean as possible. The best part of waking up is not Folgers in my cup but rather a fresh clutter-free kitchen to greet my eyes in the mornings.

My monthly or even yearly goals for my kitchen include pantry and cabinet re-organizing and deep cleaning.

Repairs or improvements for the kitchen include a new sink and granite (or something similar) countertops. That will probably be a long-time coming but at least it’s on the list.

Something to work on is keeping the kitchen floor cleaner but that requires extra work.

Stay tuned for part II: It will hopefully be about laundry,…if I get around to it.