Hard time cleaning with kids around?

Enlist their help!

I feel as soon as a child can make a mess, they're ready to learn how to pick up after themselves. This of course can (and should) be made fun for them. Encouraging them to help you around the house will eventually teach them good houskeeping skills and eventually put you out of a job :-)

For a while I was wondering "how in the world will I keep up with housework when our third is born?" The answer was "include them more during the day!" If they're helping me, they're having fun and learning and best of all - they're NOT making a mess somewhere else. Granted, sometimes when they help me they do make a bigger mess and it does take longer to complete the task but that's alright.

My kids have always helped with my duties around the house, but since Kaitlyn has been born they're both capable and interested in helping out more. Every day they help me clean certain parts. They LOVE to spray things down and rub them down. My chest freezers, fridge, washer and stove have never been as clean as they are now that I have two kids who love to rub them down! If I'm doing something that doesn't really require their help, yet I want to supervise them (in the process of staking my tomatoes) I'll give them a bottle of our non-toxic all purpose spray and let them spray away! The cleaner we use is called Basic-H which comes highly concentrated. Only a few drops of this to a spray bottle of water is all we need for an all purpose cleaner. I also use this non-toxic and organic cleaner for carpet and floor cleaning, window cleaner, cleaning our fruits/veggies, washing dishes, washing the vehicles, cleaning under the stovetop, you name it, it's been used on it! It's great to know it's nontoxic when the kids get into a spraying match...

Anyway, today we all took turns vacuuming and scrubbing the floors (with a mop, and then on our hands and knees getting all the corners and un-mopable places). The kids did a great job rubbing down the cabinets, deep freezers, fridge, washer and stove. We cleaned off the top of the deep freezers and the fridge, the kids took items I'd hand to them and put them where I told them. They thought it was fun being sent to different places in the house - many places I don't allow them unless I specifically tell them they can go. So it's fun when they are trusted enough to go there!

I took inventory of our large chest freezer. We recently bought 6 whole chickens, 40lbs of chicken breast and 70-80 lbs of beef (roasts, ground and steaks). I'm going to keep track of what we have, when we use it, and what dish we made it into, so the next time we buy our meat in bulk I know what we'll make the best use of. We don't normally eat steaks that often but we got a bundle of them with our last purchase but if they aren't eaten quickly enough I will know not to buy them again (maybe only buy when we know we want to cook 'em instead of buying a bunch and storing them) and instead spend our money on ground beef or roasts. I rearranged everything to see how much room we have in there - there should be enough for a deer or two and/or plenty of rabbit and duck. I'm kicking my husband out to do a lot of hunting this year (can you hear him saying "oh, darn!"). I told him to get me a deer for our anniversary on November 19th.

Next year we're still seriously considering starting to raise rabbit for meat. I recently learned we can use a gun to dispatch the rabbits (it seems all of the information I've accumulated have instructions on how to dispatch a rabbit by breaking it's neck or knocking it out - things I just am not comfortable doing incase it's done wrong and I cause the animal pain!). At first, Bret will be doing the butchering but we'll likely have to dispatch the litters we breed maybe 4x a year or more depending on how many does we breed and how many litters we plan. Bret isn't always going to be home for that with his work schedule. Using a gun, where I can restrain the rabbit and know for sure it's not going to be injured/feel pain before it's killed I feel much more comfortable. The actual butchering process after that I can handle... It's just the killing part that I had trouble with. I still will, I'm sure, for a while but it'll be a little easier knowing I dont have to risk hurting the rabbits and having them die a painful death.

We had a fun day today - I cooked a big breakfast and set the crockpot up for a meatloaf and veggie dinner. Then once Bret got back from helping a buddy, he took the kids and I to the Toledo Firefighters Museum. Today was actually fire safety day for the kids so there was a lot of activity and fun things to see. Once we left there, we stopped at the orchard down the road and got two bushels of apples, 30 lbs of potatoes and some acorn and butternut squash. I can't wait to make and freeze some apple pies!

Oh - we had my 6 week appointment with my midwives and Kaitlyn was just under 11lbs. She's gotten so big! I know it happens but it's a surprise every time! :-) She's almost outgrown her newborn outfits. She still fits in 0-3 but it's obvious that won't be for too much longer. She's not really getting too chunky outward but she sure is growing long!