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Last week I posted about our brand new spiffy household schedule. I really wanted to try something to get B and I into a good routine so that our house doesn’t look like a pit all the time. Now that I’m staying home, I get in such a crummy mood if the place looks like a tornado went through it. I’m in a much better mood when it’s straightened up, and it gives me a lot more motivation to actually get things done. Does this happen to you? When it’s a mess, I just want to sit on my butt all day and do nothing.

So, we’re right smack in the middle of our first true week of doing this schedule.  How’s it working? Great! Better than I thought it would, actually. For now, anyway. We attempted to start last week, but we hadn’t really figured out the logistics of planning on who would do what chores, so we made this our first official week. I’m so excited about it! It’s honestly a lot easier to clean when you don’t have a million and one tasks to do in one day; It’s so nice having them broken up.

To view our full schedule, click here.

I love white boards…I had bought one when I was still working and used it at my desk to keep track of the projects I was working on. Well, since I’m no longer working, I decided to make use of that board for our weekly schedule. We put up all of our meals for the week on the board, along with the week’s extra task (deep cleaning a certain room, washing the dog bedding, etc.)

Then, we used some craft sticks (tongue depressors?) and wrote down all of the tasks. We even broke down the cooking by day. (Brian’s been doing most of the cooking since Monkey was born, but I really want to start doing more of it…and this is the perfect way to get me to jump in. Of course… I picked four days to cook this week!) Then, we took turns drawing sticks. We chose to be completely random with each task. It worked out great this week, but I’m curious to see how it goes over time – I’m sure I’ll start getting annoyed if I get ‘poop scoop yard’ every single week! Ew. I also got ‘clean chicken coop’ this week – but Brian’s stuck with cleaning the rabbit pen so we’re almost even. We each have a cup that will house our sticks for the week. Once they’re complete we move the stick back to the main cup.

It was almost fun, but mostly nerve-wracking to pick out our chores. I started thinking about how if this works out long term, we can incorporate Monkey as he gets older. The three of us can all choose our chores for the week, and he can see that even mommies and daddies have to do chores too. Yeah that’s thinking way ahead of time, I know. Maybe I’ll stick with looking forward to him crawling.

In short – it’s working for us so far. I’d be lying if I said we did everything perfectly…last week when we were semi starting the schedule, we ended up having to do both Thursday and Friday’s chores on Friday. But, even then it wasn’t so bad. We’re also trying to take a pretty laid back approach with this knowing that we won’t always get everything done. But, I have a feeling this is going to help a ton with keeping our mood up and it will also help us with our budgeting. Once Bri starts working, I know I’ll have to pick up a lot more of the work, but by then Monkey will be older and wont be quite as needy as he is now. Here’s hoping we stick with this! I know it sounds pretty juvenile to be drawing straws and assigning chores, but if it’s what works for us, I don’t care. Plus, it makes me feel young again.

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Posted on January 12, 2012 by thecrunchywife

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