I have a confession to make. Remember when I bragged that my son’s bedwetting issues were over? Yeah, well, call it the parent-of-one-child intoxication, but after a week of dry sheets, I am now swimming knee high in smelly, wet bedding on a daily basis. I’ve gone through one of those large jugs of Tide-with-Bleach in one week. What’s that, like 42 loads? Insane.
I mentioned this problem at my book club and one woman – the mother of two grown boys – said the bedwetting at her house got so bad when her kids were young that she would literally …read more

Yesterday I went to the hardware store and bought myself this Shark Deluxe Steam Mop. I hate using regular mops with buckets of cleaning solution but all those fancy little mops like the Swiffer Wet Jet or Mr. Clean mop all required special solution and special cleaning pads.
I often found myself cleaning my floor on my hands and knees – those were the only times I was ever grateful to have a smaller kitchen than I’d like. But really, enough was enough. Also, our parquet floors in the rest of the apartment had seen better …read more

Today, due to a certain level of messiness that has become a running theme in our household, I found myself looking up chore charts – I found some cute ones here with lots of themes to fit plenty of interests.
Now I have to decide whether to use them or not. (I also have to consider getting some for myself, ahem, hi there untamed mountain of laundry.)
We’ve always sort of kept it loose. There are certain things the kids can do – the oldest can clear plates, the youngest can set cutlery (except knives) and condiments on the table, …read more

I love this series of videos! We’ll be moving within the next two months and I’d like to get a jump start on the kids’ toys before we even move in to make sure we get a handle on it without having to resort to just shoving stuff into closets and into drawers.
Though my kids are getting a little older and don’t have as many toys anymore, what they do have still takes up a lot of space and can really junk up a room if not taken care of! The other videos in the series include:
~ Choosing a …read more

One of my favorite websites, The Consumerist, has a section of the site dedicated solely to what they call the Grocery Shrink Ray. Basically manufacturers are shrinking product amounts while keeping the packaging and pricing the same.
I first ran into this several months ago when I needed to get some yogurt for a recipe and realized I’d need two containers whereas I used to only need one. A little while before that I noticed when putting away packages of bulk-store bought toilet paper that the newer packages I’d just bought were a good half inch shorter than the older …read more

Tonight, my husband and I had one of those moments of sharing brain waves, I love when that happens. Just the other night I had read (and I wish I could remember where, it was one of the MANY blogs I read) that a good rule of thumb for allowances for younger kids is to give them half their age. I had meant to talk to him about it, but then tonight he brought it up at the dinner table, explaining to our oldest what an allowance is, and how you get one. I mentioned the …read more

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We’ve had our house on the market for the last several weeks and because of this it’s important that things stay spotless so we can dash out when a realtor calls. I don’t usually care so much that the house is gleaming – tidy is nice – but we’re in a tough area for selling right now and can use any help we can get!
Anyway, keeping things clean is easy to do when I’m the only one home. But when the girls walk in the door from school there’s suddenly stuff just everywhere …read more

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I’ve been thinking about chores lately. Our kids don’t really have any set chores right now at age two and five, but I’m starting to rethink that. It’s not that they get to eat peeled grapes with their feet up while I sweat up a storm cleaning around them all day long. They do clean up, they just don’t have specific jobs. I’ll ask my oldest to make her bed, my youngest will help pick up toys and put them back in their proper baskets in the …read more

My oldest daughter’s room is a nightmare. Some days I am sorely tempted to throw out everything but the bed and three articles of clothing.
My youngest daughter has often enjoyed cleaning up, but her sister’s example has been leading her away from that and now she’s becoming a little more fond of tossing her toys across the room and then just leaving them there.
I do try to enforce the rule of “put it away before you take something else out” but sometimes it doesn’t work out, either because whatever they’re playing with has eight billion pieces anyway or …read more

Sometimes it’s a total losing battle (or at least it feels that way!) to try to keep things organized and neat with kids. I know that after a solid month of school I’m still trying to get my daughter to understand that dumping her backpack in the middle of the doorway is not cool. As a result, I just can’t WAIT (heavy on the sarcasm) for Winter when there are eight billion layers to deal with. It threatens to be a veritable trail of scarves and mittens left to marinate in slush from boots. Yippee!
But then …read more