Thanks to Discount Cleaning Products for sponsoring this series! 
Well . . . Not sure how to write a progress report for this past week. How about: Nony struggles to keep her work area neat. While she exhibits great enthusiasm for creative projects and shows promise as a leader of group activities, her inability to balance the projects she enjoys with mundane (but necessary) tasks are likely to inhibit her future potential. Plays well with others: Excellent Participates in all scheduled activities: Very Good Keeps personal space neat and organized: Needs Improvement (LOTS of improvement) It’s been a crazy week. Hubby has been out of town, the kids had swimming lessons, one boy is in the playoffs for baseball (in which they play SERIES!), we took a one-day trip to spend the day with friends, and we’re preparing for VBS next week at our church. I truly have no idea what we’ve been eating for our meals, except that on the day Hubby mentioned he was eating at a nice seafood restaurant, I had eaten so much trail mix in the afternoon that I just skipped dinner. Yes. It’s been that kind of week. We didn’t get much done as far as real cleaning, but we did do the laundry and one crazy (but focused) pick-up (with the motivation of making the house look nice for a missed-terribly-Daddy) made a Humongous difference. Really. As I said in the e-book, weeks like this happen. But the difference between these totally-made-up grades and a real grade book is that you are able to start over completely each week. Or each day. And last week’s grades get completely erased instead of bringing down your average for the rest of the semester. How did you do this week? Anyone have a funny cleaning story? Anyone come up with a great way to get kids involved? 
June’s sponsor for my Teaching Kids to Clean series is Discount Cleaning Products, and they’ve offered to give FIVE lucky commenters on this post . . . . a Microfiber Dusting Magnet Cloth! Just leave a comment telling me about your week (the good, the bad, or the ugly) and you’ll be entered to win! See my giveaway policies here. This giveaway will close at 10 p.m. Central time on Tuesday, June 26th and the winners will have 48 hours to respond to my email! And don’t forget, they also have a kit with the supplies you need to get going on your Summer of Clean! NOTE: Giveaway is now over. 
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I’ve been doing my laundry in the backyard in a kiddie pool with two rubbermaid bins. I have convinced the boys in our home that we are “fishing” – now the three year old stands at the backdoor and asks, “pwease help you with the clothes.”
Give a boy a fish and he will eat for a day. Teach a boy that doing laundry is fishing and you can move on to other projects. 🙂
Jody that is genius!!! Please excuse me if I adopt a version of that for my little girl!
Hope you have fun 🙂
Well, I am going with just a C- for the week. Better luck starting NOW!
I have a funny but old cleaning story for you. When my now-all-grown-up son was about three years old he overheard me discussing household chores and routines with some girlfriends. He announced to everyone that “We just go to bed at night and when we wake up in the morning, the house is clean!” (When the kids were really little I used to do all my chores after they went to bed. It was pointless to clean up anything while they were still awake.)
Yes, I can DO this! D- this week but the only way to go is UP
We did fairly good this week, but only because my kids have decided that it’s fun to fold laundry. I HAVE NO IDEA WHERE THEY HEARD THIS FROM, it was definitely not me… I hate folding laundry. I’d rather clean the toilet.
I am encouraged!! I found your “weekly task” sheet and have been using it to guide my cleaning for the day. ie doing all the things that my brain sees while I am doing the task. I am seeing progress. And progress in areas that I didn’t even know bugged me. Thank you so much for your blog!!
I’ve been reading through your archives and I feel like I wrote them myself. I’ve been stressed and depressed lately and your blog is lifting me out of the mire. Thank you!
On Tuesday morning a friend (but one who has never been to my house before because we haven’t known each other that long) called and said she really needed someone to watch her 2 boys while she went to the dentist. One thing about this lady is that she is a NEAT FREAK!! I (and the boys) went into a cleaning frenzy! We got the whole house clean in just a few hours. It was a good thing too because Tuesday night I came down with a really, really bad cold. So now for the past 3 days I have done nothing but sit…well, as much as I can with 5 little boys in the house!
I have not done very good this week. I did manage to keep up with the dishes but the laundry has been piling up quickly. I am in the process of packing to move into my house next week. Its exciting but exhausting. I still try to maintain as much of routine as I can though.
a good solid B..the kids are really living up to the expectations and i’ve discovered what i’ve always known..i’m a great MANAGER..no a doer but a supervisor…
apparently i do know what needs to be done, great at making sure someone ELSE does it….but when it’s just me in the house…nope…can’t do it..sigh..
well at least my failings are great teaching opportunities for the kidlets
Celina-I’m the same way! I know what needs to be done; more than ready to hand out orders, but fail miserably at ‘managing’ myself! I need to devise a plan to boss myself around, then, hopefully things will get done.
My summer clean-up has stalled. I’d love to win your giveaway! It might lift my spirits and get me back on track!
My mom has come to live out her last months with us and I now have all of our junk AND her junk to sort through. I’m picking my way slowly and sentimentally through her stuff. And throwing so much stuff that sometimes I actually believe I WILL end up with each thing in its place. Yeah. Such a cute clean the kitchen drawer video! AND I loved that you learned that it’s not just about “straightening”. It’s about finding places for things to belong, and THROWING.
Nutty. Came back from a two-week trip Tuesday. I have managed to get all the suitcases (for a family of 5) unpacked and a lot of laundry done but the rest of the house is a wreck.
Well, it WAS going good until hubby and son decided to cook late last night. I came down to a kitchen that had food, trash, spices and dirty dishes all over the place!! Both are out of the house working and volunteering this morning, so I get to clean everything all over again. Sigh… 🙁
Well, we’ll take a “B” for the week. We actually had a quiet week so i was able to organize all those piles of grown out clothing that were taking over. With those out of the way things just look much neater. You can actually sit down in the chair in the baby’s room. 🙂 Yes, it was that bad. While deep cleaning was not a priority the house does look “cleaner” and for that we are all thankful. The weekends are filled with baseball tournaments (right there with ya on that and thanks for all the great picnic ideas!) so the house will be decent as we run in and out, dropping our stuff and untidying everything I worked so hard for this week. Ready to start again next week.
I think you’re absolutely right: weeks like this happen. It’s summer vacation, and wouldn’t you rather look back with great memories of those baseball games (Congratulations on making the playoffs!) and swimming, than on the days you missed because you were busy cleaning house?
That, at least, is what I’m telling myself this weekend when I start mumbling about how I’ve spent the past two days watching the Dark Shadows series on Netflix.
This week,I focused on cleaning the master bedroom. I have a cedar chest at the foot of my bed which has been piled high with clothes for months so I decided to clean it off Wednesday. I was about halfway through the pile when I picked up a shirt and a mouse jumped from the cedar chest onto my dress and started a frantic race toward my face.
I jumped backwards,tripped,fell in the floor and the mouse decided to leave for a safer place(ie:my closet).Needless to say,I spent the rest of the day buying and putting out mouse traps.I think I’ll wait until next week to work on the bedroom again.
This week-B. They folded towels (this took a lot of reminding and most of a morning), picked up in their bedroom (also much reminding and most of a morning), and the 6yo cleaned toilets and wiped down bathroom counters without supervision. None of it came out perfect, but it all turned out better than it was before.
I’m giving myself a D….. floor very sticky from sweet tea incident and laundry is WAY backed up, as in we do not have any clean bath towel!.
I mopped and swept on Monday, bleached the grout in my bathroom on Tuesday, did a quick pickup on Wednesday and had adult time with my friends the rest of the week. Overall, it doesn’t look like I did nothing even though today is nap day, so I say a B.
I’ve been loving my not-so-content 6 month old this week while the rest of the kids make messes. My laundry piles are high but I’ve tried to keep up with a general tidy. Probably a B-
I found the post you had about the 5 min pick ups and the last two days we have done three of them (two of them where 3 min and my 6 year old did). Much like you this week has been a mess. My husband is out of town and I had a long to-do-list. I teach so my 3 year old still goes to daycare most of the summer – if I still have to pay he still had to go. He had a temp of 102.5 for two days and we all know what that is like. My house was a wreck and I have no idea what we had to eat. I did manage to complete the pant job in my bed room two years after we moved in! Wash and hung the laundry and made three things of banana bread to freeze. Now I need to go pick up a bit more before I go get the 3 year old!
Um, I think the phrase “i stink, i’m a failure” might be featured in my blog tomorrow. i have definitely had a “momma aint happy” moment over the state of my house. my to do list is 20 pages long, and it just keeps getting longer.
have to say i’d give myself a D– this week.
on the plus side, we have clean clothes to wear and the dishes aren’t in the sink. it could be worse.
The good – we’ve been camping for a week – ahhh!
The bad – we’ve been camping for a week – arrgh! Coming home from camping = a lot of work (laundry, drying out the tent, airing out the sleeping bags). But soo worth it for a week away with my family!
The good-my sweet baby, Addison(23 months), loves helping mommy dust!
The bad-she’ll dust the end table, the (carpeted) floor, and her face…in that order!
The ugly- the blackened mess around her mouth from the grime that stuck to the maple syrup from this morning’s waffles that mommy though she’d properly wiped off!
As the temperature in my corner of the world climbs to 41C, I thank God for air-conditioning. It’s a great motivator! I turned it on, increased the volume on the radio (so as I could still hear it with the A/C on.) and got started on the dreaded closet. I got everything sorted , bags of clothes tied shut to donate, a box of rubbish to throw out, and discovered a whole new clothes wardrobe I didn’t know I had…..and then there was a power cut. ;-P
I am a terrible procrastinator and it really feels great to have got rid of so much Stuff. I feel I accomplished quite a lot this week!