Who else love to clean the bathroom?! ….Yeah, me neither. It’s not so much the job as it is the grunge and the yuck, especially when there are a bunch of boys using it. Why can’t the pee just stay IN the toilet?!
The Grunge Cycle
For many years, I just went through a cycle. Some weeks or months I felt like I was doing good job of keeping the bathroom relatively clean on a regular, even daily basis. Then there were many other months where the bathroom was barely touched for a few weeks or so at a time. The longer I let it go, the harder it was for me to get in there and clean it.
A Solution
Last fall I had a bit of a revelation. My kids were now 8, 7, and 6 years old – 2 of them were the boy culprits, why couldn’t they clean the bathroom? I knew that none of them were at a place yet to handle a whole bathroom at a time, so I split up the jobs.
My oldest has the job of spraying and wiping down the whole outside of the toilet, and the six year old sprays and wipes down the floor around the toilet. Then my daughter is responsible for keeping the sink and mirror clean. My husband or I will take care of the rest of the bathroom.
Oh! After almost 9 years of marriage with my husband almost never cleaning the bathroom, he tells me that he never minded cleaning the bathroom. Guess who now gets to go do it?
Start-Up and Maintenance
Before I started having the kids clean the bathroom, I did do a full clean of the bathroom myself. Then the lessons started. It took a couple of weeks for them to be able to do the job without me in the bathroom with them, but now they do a pretty good job. Every once in a while I will check their work, and have them come back to fix something they missed if necessary.
Ideally, they are to complete their bathroom chores every day during our afternoon clean-up time. This way the bathroom never really gets that gross. It doesn’t always happen that way though. Even so, the grunge level is usually kept at a manageable level since it’s wiped down at least once or twice a week. The few times that we’ve completely went without any semblance of our chore routine due to my morning sickness, my hubby graciously stepped in to take care of the cleaning that needed to be done.
The Beauty of Slowing Down
Typically, I’m the type of mom who would rather do a lot of the chores herself because it gets done faster. However, it’s after instances such as this that I realize the beauty in slowing down and taking the time necessary to teach the kids how to do something themselves. As mothers, we are forming our children every day into the kind of people we want them to grow up to be. What we may not realize is that we are being formed into better versions of ourselves as well.
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