You get used to it… Because normal is just a setting on the dryer.

Brooke: I want you to want to do the dishes. 
Gary: Why would I want to do dishes?
~ The Break Up

In my ever-continuing quest to get things done around the house, one of the biggest challenge has been getting help from my family.  Now, granted The Littles are well, too little to do much more than “help” (i.e., have a lot of fun but make the job ten times longer) while I do chores – and I let them as often as time/patience allow, because hello? I’d like to foster the idea that housework is fun!  But I can’t keep up with the house at all without help from Chad.  And therein lies my challenge.

It’s not that he doesn’t want to help, or doesn’t think he should help. It took me a long time to figure this out, but it’s honestly that he doesn’t know what needs to be done at any given time, and it’s easier to ignore it than figure it out.  Hmm. I have the same problem.

So, after many arguments about who does what, and whether I should be in charge of it (he thinks yes, I think I’m not the cruise director), and after trying many, many systems (nagging, sulking, chore charts, honey-do lists, etc), we have arrived… at a system that works for now.

Every evening, Chad asks me what three things we need to get done.  This is sometimes routine stuff that I’ve been putting off (folding laundry, dishes, etc), but more often it’s just things that need to get done, period.

I still determine what goes on the list.  But because Chad asks, I feel like he’s involved in the process, and that he wants to help (yes, my brain is weird, just roll with me).  Because there’s only three things, it’s not overwhelming.  And honestly – we don’t always do all three things.  It’s just a starting point.  A direction.

Am I still doing chores after the kids go to bed?  Sure.  But picking three things to do every night allows me and Chad to work off the same list, and to feel like we’re actually making progress on something.  Which, in turn, motivates us to do a little more sometimes. And thus, the house doesn’t fall into chaos quite as often.

Three things, works for me.

You can find more Works For Me Wednesday post over at We Are THAT Family.

It’s not really a “hack”, I guess, so much as a tip that I found life alteringly profound when I discovered it (seriously, people.  It’s the little things).

So  I discovered this at my cousin’s house over Christmas, watching her do a load of laundry. She pulled the liquid soap off the shelf – and instead of pouring the soap into the lid, and then trying to rinse out the lid in the washer and put it back on the bottle (my method) – she got an extra lid off the shelf, poured the soap in, poured it into the washer – and dropped the extra lid in the washer.  The clean lid went back on the soap, and she got the extra lid out of the washer when she put the clothes in the dryer.  Totally. Genius.  No more stick laundry soap bottles or drippy lids.

I improved on it slightly when I got home by marking the fill line in the extra lid with a sharpie.  Now I know exactly how much soap to put in, and it works every time.  The line hasn’t washed out, either, and it’s been a couple of months.

So that’s my totally genius laundry hack.

I am caught up on laundry.  This fact is in and of itself amazing.

See, I tried this thing, a while back, were I did a load of laundry every day.  And it worked! And I was caught up! and it was amazing! And I looked like this:

(image courtesy of Hyperbole and a Half)

 And THEN.  I ran out of laundry. I mean, it was all clean! And there was no “one load” to do! For several days! So after practically spraining my shoulder because I was patting myself on the back so hard…. I promptly stopped doing laundry.  Until we were all out of socks and underwear. And then only washed the bare minimum to get by.

But. In my quest to minimize the STUFF in our house (OMGoodness, the STUFF), I culled down the kids clothes.  Like, a lot. Brianna helped with her clothes (to pick out ones she would wear, because trying to get a 3-year-old to wear something they don’t like is not on my top ten list of things to do every morning), and I culled down to like, just over two weeks worth of clothes each.

Amazingly, this means when they are all clean, all the clothes fit in the drawers.  I KNOW!

And now, I have to do the kid’s laundry once a week or so. Which is fine, it all fits in one load, or I can separate the darks and lights and put it with the grown-up’s laundry.  Total? about two loads a week of clothes.  Which gives me a day to wash towels, a day to wash sheets, and some slacker days (Huzzah!). AND…. I have to fold it and put it away, because people will run out of clothes otherwise. It’s amazing how much gets done when it’s a necessity.

Now I’m culling my clothes, in prep for a yard sale this weekend.

Laundry today or naked tomorrow – it works for me!

(For more Works For Me Wednesdays, visit Kristin at We Are THAT Family)