Raoul retweetet
Newborns are fairly easy. They sleep most of the day. They are only awake for a few hours, and while they are awake they are eating and being changed, then they go back to sleep again.
Babies are a little more work, but they still sleep most of the day.
What is really difficult is toddlers. As soon as they become mobile, as soon as they can crawl, they get into everything. If they are awake you have to be watching them, or you have to put them in a playpen, which I do not like. I prefer not to restrict my children’s movement like that. I prefer to prepare the house so it meets their needs.
Then they start walking and it becomes even harder.
Around five or six years old, something changes. If you have been teaching them, they can begin doing a lot of chores. They can clean up after themselves, get dressed, feed themselves properly, and handle many small responsibilities. Children can begin learning these things earlier, but around that age they usually become good enough that you do not need to intervene very much.
After that point it gradually becomes logistically easier to take care of them. It may become more expensive in some ways, but it becomes easier from a logistical standpoint. Your focus shifts more toward moral training, bonding, and guiding them.
What this means is that if you have children under the age of five, especially multiple children, it can be very difficult. The good news is that this phase only lasts for a certain period of time. After that it becomes easier again, assuming you train your children well.
All of this assumes the children are healthy. If a child has serious health issues, that is a completely different situation.
The key to getting through the under five stage is to simplify everything. Everything needs to be as simple as possible and as organized as possible, and ideally you should do that before you get yourself into that position. I would say the period when you have a newborn at home is when you should begin simplifying everything.
What does that mean?
First, have a simple roster of meals that repeat. Cook the same things every week or every two weeks in a cycle. Choose easy meals. One pot meals, or meals you can put in the oven and let them cook. They can still be homemade, nutritious, and very tasty. The point is to choose meals with very little preparation. Ideally something that takes fifteen to twenty minutes to prepare. The cooking time does not matter because the oven handles that, not you.
Second, remove everything from your house that is not required for raising your children, at least from the areas where the kids spend their time. This way you do not have to worry about them breaking things or getting into things they should not touch. Empty space is perfectly fine. If the floor is cold, put down some mats so they have a place to play. A simple open area and a few toys is all they need.
One small box of toys is enough. A two or three foot wide box with perhaps a dozen toys inside. A box of Duplos, a couple of stuffed animals, a few balls, maybe a few soft books. You may own more toys than that, but only keep a small number out at any one time. That way cleaning up after them takes five minutes at most.
You also need to set up your bathing and changing stations so that everything follows an efficient pattern of movement. You move from one step to the next and it is done. You should be able to change your baby half asleep in the middle of the night. The only way that works is if everything is laid out very clearly. Nothing to trip over, nothing to bump into, and everything kept simple.
One smart idea my wife came up with was to buy LED candles and place them in the areas of the house where you need to go at night to care for the baby. That way she could wake up half asleep, change the baby, and not need to switch bright lights on and off. She could stay half asleep and do everything almost on autopilot. That helped us tremendously.
Our challenge was that we live in a small apartment and it is easy to accumulate too many things. Even so, simplifying the space helped a great deal.
If you have older children when you have younger ones, that can make a big difference. For example, if you have a ten year old and new babies, that ten year old can be very helpful if they have been well trained. They can handle all of their own responsibilities, keep their own toys and mess organized, and help with things like loading and unloading the dishwasher, running the washing machine and dryer, folding clothes, or watching the baby for a moment while you step away. Those small contributions make a real difference.
At this stage your biggest problem is not necessarily the amount of work. There is not actually that much total volume if you have simplified things properly. If you find there is a huge amount to do, it usually means you did not simplify earlier.
The real challenge is interrupted sleep. You may lose two or three hours of sleep each night, and that loss adds up if you do not make it up during the day.
The good news is that small children sleep a lot. Babies sleep a lot, toddlers sleep a lot. If you organize things properly, when your toddler sleeps, you sleep as well until you catch up. Then you can use some of their sleep time to get other things done.
The whole approach is about reducing overhead as much as possible while still caring properly for yourself and for the children.
Even if you do everything well, you will probably become more and more tired during the stage when your children are very small. The good news is that it does not last forever. Once they grow older you recover.
Sometimes you simply have to endure the season. It passes, and you will make it through. Everyone else does. You can too.
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