Day 298 - Keeping the House Clean with an Active Baby
Today's first time parenting tip - Do a daily "partial" cleanup
When you've got a baby, toys, a short attention span and the urge to move everywhere, your house can feel a lot like a plastic jungle with toys, tupperware, books and clothes all over the place.
One of my son's favorite activities is to carry stuff back and forth across the apartment. And since he's only interested in things for five minutes at a time, you can see how the mess could pile up quick.
If my wife and I tried to have everything in its place all the time, we'd go insane. So instead, we pick up his mess once a day when he goes to bed. And "putting something in its place" is a pretty loose interpretation too.
Instead of having things perfect, we'll stack all the books on the floor, put all the small toys in a box and the bigger ones arranged along a wall. Since our son is just going to get them out when he wakes up, there's no sense making everything perfect.
This way we don't spend a ton of time cleaning up and don't get overwhelmed when all our hard work gets erased the next day. And half the fun for our son right now is pulling everything out and discovering his toys all over again.
Parenting, Toy, Clean, Sanity, Mess
When you've got a baby, toys, a short attention span and the urge to move everywhere, your house can feel a lot like a plastic jungle with toys, tupperware, books and clothes all over the place.
One of my son's favorite activities is to carry stuff back and forth across the apartment. And since he's only interested in things for five minutes at a time, you can see how the mess could pile up quick.
If my wife and I tried to have everything in its place all the time, we'd go insane. So instead, we pick up his mess once a day when he goes to bed. And "putting something in its place" is a pretty loose interpretation too.
Instead of having things perfect, we'll stack all the books on the floor, put all the small toys in a box and the bigger ones arranged along a wall. Since our son is just going to get them out when he wakes up, there's no sense making everything perfect.
This way we don't spend a ton of time cleaning up and don't get overwhelmed when all our hard work gets erased the next day. And half the fun for our son right now is pulling everything out and discovering his toys all over again.
Parenting, Toy, Clean, Sanity, Mess
Labels: clean, mess, sanity, toy
posted by Jeff Pfaller at 10:28 AM
1 Comments:
I do this as well, and it makes a huge difference to my sanity to not be tripping over toys. Of course, my son isn't quite crawling yet, but he is good at throwing things all over the place.
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