This Week

God has definitely prepared our hearts for this wait and the upcoming answer we have been waiting months to hear. This last week since our Missions interview has been filled with peace and calm, over the impending decision any way.

We have been busily spring cleaning the house, something we had planned on anyway. The rooms of our home are getting a deep cleaning. I am talking scrubbed walls, floors, doors, ect. We have cleaned out a lot of clutter as well. There have been several bags of garbage, baskets sent to the thrift store and boxes to be donated. Some things are going back to their original homes and some are going to new homes to bless other families with things we are no longer using. This all makes great prep work if we are going to be selling our house and leaving and if we aren't then it means a beautiful clean home to live in.

We have also started fleshing out some of our plans for our potential trip. This weekend we are talking a lot about what items would be on our prayer list and what our first missions newsletter will be like. I have also been visualizing our new blog. Should we get a yes, we will be switching to wordpress as it will be our missions hub and we want our updates and projects to be easy to access.

Today I am prepping for the new homeschool year. Since we have chosen to school year round, our school year starts in 1 week. It is a good reminder that even in the midst of big life changes we need to keep our everyday routine going. It also reminds me how wonderful it is to homeschool. Should we move, school will not change and we can get back into our routine gradually if needed. God has certainly blessed us and we pray He is blessing all of you as well!

Cleaning Day

Saturday is cleaning day at our house and last week was an extra fun one for me. Every time I turned around Little Guy was doing a job I never even asked him to do. Yes, it did take me a whole week to share...perhaps you have not read the post on the quantity of missions forms we have to fill out? Most of them are done and sent off now, but on to cleaning day...

I asked him to clean the sink, but he volunteered to do the bathtub too! I am noticing how tall he is in this pic , guess we don't need the step stool in there anymore.

Then he dusted the TV stand without suggestion, followed by dust mopping the house. A mom could get used to this!

I surprised him with some Octonauts magnets too. Just printed pics and put sticky magnet pieces on the back. They were a big hit and is one of his favorite shows.

My Homemaker's Journal

I mentioned before that I made a homemaker's journal. It is the cornerstone of our house! It has been so much easier to keep track of everything. It has been a lot of trial and error to get to where we are now. I will break it down for you. Keep in mind that this is what is working for me. Your family is different than mine, so you might not use the same technique.
The main tool is my planner. On the monthly pages I record appointments and schedules and what our school theme for the week is. On the weekly pages I write up my checklist. One side is for household projects and the other is for Crazy Elephant projects. Here is how a typical week plays out:

Monday: Laundry, list/update (TCE), sewing, getting photos ready for the week (TCE)
Tuesday: Sweep/vacuum, food prep for the week, list/update, blog
Wednesday: Family day
Thursday: Bathrooms, list/update, blog
Friday: laundry, list/update
Saturday: general tidying up, clean/set up school room for next week, list/update, blog
Sunday: church

I don't write school on my check list, but I do have pages written up for each day of school too. They are in Jayne's school binders with each week's materials. I started writing up my planner pages for the month and I like it that way. I do it the same time I write up our menu and grocery list for the month. The planner and my TCE notebook (previous post) go in the homemaker's binder. The binder also has detailed cleaning instructions for different rooms in the house. We don't use them often, but they are great to have for when we do. There is an inventory sheet to use as a guideline for writing up the grocery list. It includes all the foods and non foods that we always want in the house. There is a yearly calendar for checking. It includes things such as spring cleaning in April and winterizing the house in September. It helps us to remember to do them. I also have my spring cleaning chart that I use for making my spring cleaning check list.

I also have a homemaker's journal folder in my Internet favorites and on my desktop. That way I know where to go for my homemaking sites and downloads. That would be for recipes, sewing instructions, cleaning tips, etc.

As far as keeping the house clean, start by determining your standards. Clean for us is tidy, but lived in. It is not immaculate by any means, but it is tidy. Jayne picks up all his toys every night. I do the dishes each day which includes wiping down all the kitchen surfaces. Laundry is 2- 3 loads per week. When we tidy up on Saturdays we usually pick a room that really needs it and focus on it. There is still lots of time to do school, cook, work, and do daycare. We are all working on not just leaving things where they are and putting them away when we are done with them, that goes a very long way in keeping things clean. I am not sure if I have missed anything, but I have run into school time. So, feel free to ask questions, I am an open book!

Stretch It: Cleaning

Cleaning supplies can seem like they cost a fortune. We actually don't use many products. We have a relatively small house. It is just the right size for our 3 person family and doesn't have much wasted space. I have reduced my cleaning time and product use a lot. I have tried to split it up into 3 different categories.

*Green Works. I love the product line. I really appreciate the environmentally friendliness of it. I use the dish soap for washing by hand. We don't have a dishwasher, except for me that is. I have since used regular dish soap and I can feel the difference in the water. When I use the green works, it still feels like water and I like that. We use the laundry soap. I generally do 2-3 loads of laundry per week. Unlike many, I don't usually separate. When the laundry basket is full (we all put our laundry in the same one) I toss it in to wash it. Part of the reason I can do this is that I use cold water to wash everything. The soap is what is supposed to clean your clothes and everything comes out just fine. I have never noticed any staining. I do sometimes pretreat nasty stains with shout advanced for set in stains. We also use the green works toilet bowl cleaner. We had been using the kind of toilet bowl brush that the end pops off and you use a new one each time. I liked them, but they make so much waste and are pretty expensive. The green works products are not always the least expensive but they are much lower than many competitors.

*Norwex. I got my norwex products 4 years ago and they are still going strong! If there is one cleaning line that I truly believe in, this is it. If you ever go to a norwex show, you can see the demonstrations yourself. They are almost unbelievable, but they are amazing. I will go down the list of what I have and why I love them. The dusting mitt gets all the dust with no product involved at all, plus Jayne loves to wear it and help me by dusting the house. The microfiber cloths use only water and kill 99% of all bacteria. They can be used on any surface and even for dusting. I use them on my mirrors with the polishing cloth and they come out crystal clear ever time with nothing but water. I have the mop system and it works the same way as the cloths, with just water. The car cloth is great too and also just uses water, that is an entire car clean with just water. I use the drier balls with the laundry too. You can get those almost anywhere now and it means not buying softener. The one downside to the Norwex products are the higher price. But if you off set the price of buying products, they aren't bad.

*The rest. Our vacuum does not use bags, so no extra cost there. We still have many products that are just used occasionally or during spring cleaning like comet, magic erasers, oven and stove top cleaners, and some others that I don't ever use. These are things that I don't have to buy more than once a year, sometimes longer. My all time favorite cleaning trick is for the very difficult to clean microwave. Microwave a bowl of water (with lemon if you want to freshen the scent) for a couple of minutes and it loosens up everything making it super easy to wipe down.

I will be sharing more about organizing my cleaning and my homemaker's journal in another post. For now, I would love to hear about your favorite products and tips for easy cleaning!