Gratitude Attitude

 One of the problems with having people around the house all the time is that you can get on each others' nerves because you never get a break from each other.  In the Bible, one third of the verses on why God gets angry are about ingratitude. We get angry at ingratitude, too, don't we? Having a family culture of gratitude can lift your whole family.

How do you that? The easy thing is to start by teaching your children to say "thank you". We are accustomed to telling our children, "Say, 'thank you!'" We need to start by saying "thank you" ourselves! Every habit we want to instill in our children starts with us. That means we have to be a good example. Saying "thank you" never gets old. Everyone appreciates it.

Another way to grow an attitude of gratitude in your family is to have "thank yous". As part of our family's prayer time we go around the room and give a public "thank you". It is a "thank you" to God. 

We also do "loves" which are when each person shares some loving thing that they have observed someone else doing. It is another kind of "thank you". 

You can come up with your own methods to train a gratitude attitude, but that one thing lifts everyone's spirits and helps them get used to appreciating one another and everything around them. 

How Do I Keep My House Clean With All These People in the House!

 Yup. You go to visit your friend who has two children in school and works and has a cleaning service come in once a week and then you look at your house. Four kids, you homeschool and the only time the kids are out of the house, you are, too. How can you possibly have a clean house? 

I'm not that great of a cleaner. I'm a tidier. I can't think if there's a lot of clutter, but clean is a matter of taste for me. I dust once every two or three years. But as my mother told me when I had five kids under the age of seven, "You have little kids; people who stop by expect you to have a certain amount of toys and dirty socks lying around. But you want people to feel safe eating your food and using your bathroom." That was a gift from my mother: have a hygienic, not sterile, house. 

So, yes, my kitchen and bathroom get a going over pretty regularly, though I'm a little blase about mopping the floors; but what about the rest of the house?

First, let me tell you that I used to clean the rec room with a broom. I don't mean I swept it up, I picked it up. I would sweep all the toys into the center of the room and put them away from there. I know what a dirty house looks like, so please do not be intimidated by what I'm saying here.

Don Aslett, the cleaning guru of the 80s and 90s, said the best way to keep your house clean was not to let it get dirty in the first place. In light of that, your main entrance for the family should have three things:

1--Doormats indoors and out to allow four steps as you enter. That gets off most of the ordinary amount of dirt on the shoes and boots.

2--Have storage for shoes, coats, hats, and backpacks (if that is important for you) as close to the front door as possible. You want to keep them from getting dumped on the floor because that will make it harder to sweep or vacuum. In light of that--

3--Keep a broom/vacuum as close to the door as possible so you can clean it easily. 

Along those lines, keep your cleaning tools as close to the things they clean as possible. If you have carpet upstairs and downstairs, have two vacuums. You can alternate years on getting new vacuums so you don't have a big expense all at once. If you have a long ranch house, keep the broom or vacuum as central as you can. 

Each room should have a wastepaper basket with a plastic liner. It should be easy to throw away the trash! I use disposable grocery bags whenever I get them, and put three in the bottom of the basket for the future and use a fourth to line the basket. The liner is important. For one thing, it makes it less of a mess when there are pencil shavings or used gum in the basket. Secondly, an under-two-year-old child can participate in cleaning the house by pulling up the handles of the grocery bag and learning how to tie them in a knot, or just throwing them into a big trash bag you are following him around with.

Each wet place should have its own cleaning tools--a set for each bathroom and the kitchen. 

Choose cleaning products that limit the number of tools you need. Our pastor and his wife had started two Christian camps and knew how to clean and keep down the expenses. They cleaned everything with either bleach or vinegar. You may pick your own, but it will be easier to teach your children if you don't have to explain five different cleaning products to them. Another possibility is having one product for everyday cleaning and a stash of serious products for periodic cleaning, like getting the rust stains out of the toilet. If you are a duster, keep a cleaning cloth or Swiffer-ish thing tucked away in each room so it is easy to do the dusting.

Cleaning is something we just have to do. We don't have to like it, but our families need it done. Remember, they can help!

Decluttering--Everything!

 Last week, on the way to homeschool group, we were driving through the countryside and I saw my favorite picture in the world: a freshly mown field with the haybales still there waiting to be picked up. I don't much care for late summer. Everything gets messy--the weeds get bigger than the flowers, which have gotten all leggy and lost their blooms, you can't get through the vegetable garden, the crabgrass is growing over the walk. Harvest time--the autumn--everything gets cleaned up. The plants die back and the fields are shorn, their crops organized and tidy and there is abundance in the barn. 

It made me think of decluttering a house. We need to do that, don't we? Right now, we are dismantling our kitchen and I had to sort out the--oh, no!--junk drawer! It took longer than any other drawer as I divided everything in it among Put Away, Give Away, and Throw Away piles. I do the same thing whether I'm clearing out a bookshelf, a closet, a cupboard, or a drawer. Everything in your house has an emotional claim on your life, and most of us have enough demands on us; we don't need garbage claiming us, as well. So everything needs to have a home. On the other hand, just because it has a home, does not mean we need to keep it. Choose wisely! Once we have decluttered, we find we have more elbow room emotionally as well as physically. Abundance!

God declutters us, too. In the Old Testament, the Israelites would regularly add stuff to their worship of the Lord--idol worship, child sacrifice, and the rest. So God would send the mower through, decluttering their lives by showing them how useless those extra things were as their fields were barren or their crops and animals and children stolen by enemies, and they would turn back to the Lord, simplifying their lives, getting back to the fundamentals of worshiping the Lord. What did God give them after they had repented and turned back to Him? The crops grew, they could by their children back. Abundance!

When our lives get leggy and overgrown with extra stuff that isn't him, He does the same thing for us, pushing us to where we know we have to get back to just Him--less running to meetings and get-togethers, turning down the music and turning off the TV and the phone. What does He give us? An abundance of time and focus on Him and on our families.