It’s been three months since my first article, in which I wrote about learning the art of outsourcing and writing it all down to keep myself accountable. More than ever, I have needed to outsource, with my one-year-old now running around full speed and destroying everything in his path. The first-born child’s ‘it’s easier to do it myself’ mentality felt less and less possible because I had so little time, and so the necessity became even more apparent.
Three months in, and I feel like I’ve made improvements. Still, I’ve also learned more along the way that I wanted to share and reflect on because the mental load conversation seems to be everywhere I look, with a recent TV show even having a viral moment for one scene that discusses it.
I also think it’s important for women to be transparent about the help they receive, because social media is perpetuating the false idea that we all do it all and have the same 24 hours in a day.
There are some changes I’ve made that I know are luxuries, but without family close by, they have helped us move out of survival mode.
Three huge things that made a difference are that I switched to weekly housecleaning help, got a more reliable and consistent babysitter, and hired a handyman who handles even the smallest jobs. And I mean smallest. Once when he was here, he cleaned my dryer and then changed my batteries to some light-up pumpkins for Halloween because you needed the world’s tiniest screwdriver.
The cleaning help, the babysitter, and the handyman were all actually ridiculously hard to find, and we trialed a lot of people. The handyman asked if he had finally passed my interview one night when he was here at 8 p.m., still working, and although he was joking, we all knew he wasn’t.
Changing to the weekly help really highlighted to me just how much I was doing before. If it takes two ladies (plus sometimes me working on other house projects) 3-4 hours a week, then that has given me back those 6-8 hours a week, maybe more, because these ladies are working non-stop without the interruption of childcare or the inevitable, “Mom, I need a snack.”
They don’t do it all, but they do the big, time-consuming things for me, like a deeper kitchen and bathroom clean, laundry, making the beds, a more thorough vacuum, mopping, and the important job of finding my kids’ latest hiding spot for snacks.
But before I reached this point of feeling like it was progress, it was a journey. To know what I wanted from the people, I needed a plan and added systems. And that was the first project.
When you find social media accounts about moms with systems and the ‘download my helpful plan here’ kind of stories, I quickly noticed one thing. They did not apply to life with young kids at all. One read “if you don’t already, you need a weekly rotation with a clear checklist that you can run through each day. For example, Wednesdays you vacuum, Thursdays you clean the toilets, Fridays are the day you change the bed sheets.
I was so confused. I’m thinking to myself, but I’m vacuuming every day because my son is walking around, crunching Cheerios into the carpet. My four-year-old spilled something on his bed on Tuesday, and then my one-year-old and his peanut butter hands ruined it again on Thursday, and I can’t wait until Friday. And let’s not even talk about how we are all cleaning the highchair fifty-five million times a day.
The thing all these ‘helpful’ system accounts weren’t accounting for was young kids destroying your work right away. I needed my systems to work for me and our often unique family situation, and there have been things that have lapsed dramatically, so here I am telling myself and the universe that I’m going to get this back in order.
1. Batch cooking when I know my husband is travelling.
I try so hard not to cook full meals when he is away because it’s when the kids get up to the most mischief, or they want to help, and I go to bed every day that week overstimulated. I batch-cook the day before we have the helpful ladies come to clean, because then I know we are not destroying the kitchen as soon as they leave that afternoon, and just for a moment, the kitchen remains clean.
2. Plan out weekly outfits for the kids.
In both of my kids’ closets, I have a set of hanging baskets, each labelled Monday through to Friday, and their outfits are set for the week on a Sunday. This has been working great because my four-year-old likes the responsibility of dressing himself, and neither of us has to search for anything in the mornings. He knows he’ll find a pair of socks, underwear, pants, and a shirt in there. For the one-year-old, it’s more about being fast so I can hold him down and dress him before he runs away.
3. Set up a family calendar.
I’m not talking about birthday parties or doctors’ appointments (yes, those are on there too), but a full breakdown of the week: goals I have, people coming into the house, projects I have at work, and dinner plans. It’s become more than dates; it’s me writing the mental load out so we can visually see the lists I have going on in my head.
