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Despite my ornery self, He heard my prayer in the middle of my dark and overwhelming night.
    Now before I share the answer to that prayer with you, let me tell you about my philosophy on cleaning. I abide by the saying, “My house should be clean enough to be healthy, but messy enough to be lived in.” Because I homeschool our children, I don’t ever expect my home to look like it came out of a magazine. I—along with four to five children (depending on the time of year)—am home at least four days a week all day. My house isn’t going to stay pristine just because I clean all the time. Not possible. I strive for balance between being a good mom, teacher, cook, wife, and homemaker. I’ll trade a random opportunity to bounce around on the trampoline with my kids over scrubbing the baseboards any day!
    Sure, I know a handful of ladies who are good housekeepers, great housekeepers, in fact. I have tried to figure out with my husband how they do it. Here is what I have learned. We all have the same twenty-four hours in a day. If someone else’s home is always pristine, it has to do with how she spends her time. My friend with the beautiful home and four homeschooled children has children all over the age of twelve. (Do you hear that, moms of small children? She has no little people!) Sure, she is running around to basketball and soccer practice, but with four other capable bodies in the house, she also has lots of help. Another friend of mine with small children has a gorgeous magazine-ready home. But her children spend three days a week at a Mother’s Day Out . . . and she has a nanny. My friend who makes gourmet meals every night has her kids in traditional school all day.
    I also have a friend whose home is always in disarray, but she enjoys her little children and plays with them quite a bit more than I play with mine. They are always outside playing or inside working on some neat craft. Creativity and fun are their family’s highest values in their current season. Ladies, it’s all about how God designed you and what is important in your life right now. That determines how you choose to spend your time. No one can do it all.
    So as a mom in the middle of mothering preschoolers on up to young adults, I just do my best. If I tried to put housework first at all costs, something else that is important would suffer: building relationships with my children.
    As a result of my revelation, I have gone through a series of adjustments in my personal expectations over the last few years so that I can stay sane.
    A few of my compromises are as follows:
I aim for a clean kitchen twice a day. Three times is a luxury. Even so, I always expect there to be dishes in the sink.
I shoot for a mopped floor two times a week, unless otherwise necessary. It’s just too depressing to mop the floor only to find in just a few hours that it doesn’t look like I did anything.
I try to hit each room in my house once a week on a rotating schedule. What does this mean? My house is not clean all at the same time.
I’m constantly training my children to care for our home, because I’m trying to work myself out of a job. This means our “clean home” is not going to be perfectly clean.
Laundry is always going. I do about a load a day.
My carpet is never going to look new, no matter how many rules I make about food and drink staying in the kitchen. It just doesn’t happen. What can I say?
We live in our home. My teenager does schoolwork at the computer, my little ones do schoolwork at the kitchen table, we congregate at the island—in short, we are all over the place. As we transition to the dinner hour, I shoot for things in their place. If I can’t have that, then I shoot for neat piles.
Oh, and the baseboards? I get to ’em when I get to ’em. (Or I’ll just wait until my little ones are old enough to do a good job—they are nearer to the floor anyway!)
    But here’s my problem. I am comfortable with the standards in my home. But