Homemaker at Heart!

There's something strangely delightful about "getting" to do housework...now that my girls have taken over most of it! Days like today when Grace and Mary are visiting Grandparents and Hannah and Sarah are away cleaning someone else's home... and poor Ruthie is recovering from the flu....I "get" to do everything! And I get to do things MY way. It makes me feel young again. I love the challenge of multitasking: get the washer running, and THEN sort the laundry, fill the dishwasher and get that going, put some meat and onions on to simmer for stew (or whatever) later, soak rice to cook for lunch and sweep up; leaving a nice pile of dirt mixed with blocks, legos, lincoln logs, and other miscellaneous treasures which Peter will have to deal with later. And even steal a few minutes to blog:)

This is not the way it is when everyone is home and up and running! Then I must direct, correct, inspect and so on. With so many to teach and train it's hard to break away and actually DO a job myself. (Not so much the more grown up they are of course). I don't think it's really fair to keep doing a task that I know how to do well when it is a skill that one of the children needs to have. Often, when I ask someone to do something they reply "I don't know how" and I say "Oh good, your just the right person for the job then". (So that excuse never works around here)

This morning I was reading in Isaiah: "Here a little, there a little, precept upon precept, line upon line etc..." At this point in my life I am still in the throws of living out this concept but also have proof that it works! My older girls are great homemakers! In fact they surpass my abilities in many areas and have actually taken over some areas of the work.

Take the laundry for instance. We have two laundry rooms each equipped with a washer and a dryer; one upstairs and one down. Accordingly, the upstairs laundry is to be done upstairs and the downstairs; downstairs. We have one person in charge of each level. In order to keep the utilities down we try to never use the dryer. I have never tallied the loads we do per week but you can imagine with eleven people living here...it's alot. Now if it's up to me I'll tend to "splurge" and throw things in the dryer to save time and labor. But the girls have fits and scold ME (especially one of them) if I do. So they have devised all sorts of indoor clothes drying methods and use them faithfully. Here's what our house looks like almost all winter unless we know we're getting company:)

"Whatever your hand finds to do, do it with all your might" Eccl 9:10a