Running a Smooth Household: Kitchen Patrol

Month 2 of following along Kay's book Cleaning House. Lats month our family focused on tidiness. Mainly with their rooms and bathroom. You can look at that post here. This month we focused on our kitchen. The joys of cooking, menu planning, shopping and dishes! Fun right. Yea, I was not too excited either. The kitchen is not my strong suit at all. My mom never taught me and therefore I lack some serious kitchen skills I am still trying to acquire. Never the less, this was our focus. The family that learns together, cries together. Probably not the euphemism you thought you would read.

For our second month of following Kay we worked on developing running a smooth kitchen, ok at least a clean one! My kids had to still keep their bedrooms clean and the bathroom, but we added on teh kitchen for them to earn money this month. They each got a new jar filled wth $30 they they starte dout the month with. They had to do basic things:

My 6 year old:
1. Kkeep the cabintes washed down
2. Wipe off the outside of the fridge
3. pick up the kitchen floor
4. Take out the trash-when it was not too heavy for him

My older ones:
1. Sweep- daily
2. Mop- 2xs week
3. Wash Dishes-daily--sometimes my youngest helped out here too although we had to go behind him when he was not looking :)
4. Put Dishes away -sometimes my youngest helped out here too

Mom:
1. Wash dishes on weekend and Wendsdays
2. Mop on weekend
3. Sweep on Weekend
4. Wipe down cabintes and fridge on Tuesdays and weekend

I would love to say we did fabulous this month, but sadly with our hectic schedules and frequenctly being out till the kids bedtimes we failed miserably this time around. The kids were left with only about half their money and the same went for me too. The money ended up in out Christmas fund instead.

This one was a real eye opener for us all. There have been many times we looked around the house and wondered why it wa sa mess. Well it came down to time. Soemthing we are now fixing. Too many of our nights are filled with baeball, church (I know, I know, but serously we have 4 days dedcicated to church activites), cub scouts, AGH etc that we are not home enough to accomplish the things we need to. So we had to make a decision to scale down our outside activities and refocus. None of what we do is bad, its just time consuming and we realized tht this last month.

We are going to be giving this one another shot in June when most of our activities end and see if/what imporicements are made. Until then we are going to do our best and stay focused. You cannot win them all :)