As any couple knows, managing all the household duties can be difficult. It's definitely made more complex once baby comes along. Before our baby, I had 4 whole days off work, so I had no problem with spending one day running errands, cleaning, organizing, balancing the checkbook, laundry, etc. I had all the free time in the world during those 4 days off. Sometimes I try to think about how I spent my free time on those days. I always felt busy - that's laughable nowadays.
Anyways. Post child. How do I fit doing all those tasks in? Is it really my responsibility now that I have a child to take care of? Should I ask my husband who works 50-60 hours minimum per week (compared to my 40) to be helping out more? AH! The headaches and conundrums.
First and foremost with managing a household, the most important thing is COMMUNICATION. My husband and I sat down and discussed all of what we NEED done during the week, what can maybe be slacked upon, and what is super low priority. Some things like the floor being vacuumed/swept/mopped is becoming more of a priority because we have a baby crawling on the ground ALL the time and we also have a pet. Other things like deep cleaning have become a much lower priority that we will just "tolerate" because we would rather have family time.
Things that we deemed high priority (1xper week) were:
- working out (both of us)
- family dinners (on nights I am not working)
- balancing the checkbook & budgeting/financial planning
- laundry
- cleaning (some items)
- grocery shopping
- yard work
Things that had medium priority but could be slacked on:
- cleaning (some items)
Low priority (1x/month) items:
- deep cleaning
After discussing what we thought were high priority needs we also communicated about our schedules and how much time we had for our higher priority items.
My biggest concern/complaint that I communicated was that I was taking care of P all day long, and trying to work out, and it didn't leave me a ton of time to do some other things. I had felt like all of our high priority things were on my plate. B was under the presumption that I had more time to do these because I had 4 days off work. He didn't really stop to contemplate that I was also doing all the SAHM things with P.
One concern B had was that cleaning would take too long. For someone who has only maybe 5-10 minutes of spare time here and there, would cleaning be possible? Spending 1 hour cleaning everything isn't really feasible anymore now that we have a baby.
We devised a plan for tackling cleaning, which is what I felt I needed help with most. This way, I could tackle making dinner, working out, and other household things, while tag-teaming the cleaning. We made a checklist (my specialty) of all the cleaning chores that we felt needed to get done during the week. This checklist is posted in our "hub" so that we can see it frequently, see what needs to be done, and when the last time something was done. We initial it once it's done. We broke down the chores into easy tasks that take approximately 5-10 minutes each. Nothing is ever that urgent where if it doesn't get done, we are having a mental breakdown. We simply see that it wasn't done the week prior and put it at the top of our list for the following week.
The other benefit of doing the chores like this is that everything maintains a baseline level of cleanliness. One thing B didn't realize was that if you keep things moderately clean, then when you go to clean them the next time, you don't have to put as much effort in because you aren't deep cleaning you are just maintaining. Ding ding ding. It finally clicked with him :)
Another thing that my husband and I are constantly doing is re-evaluating everything. We check in and let each other know how things are going. So far with our checklist, we are doing great. But we both know that if we are getting overwhelmed or feeling like this isn't the best way of doing things, then we can always re-evaluate a better way.
Check out below for what our checklist looks like.
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