Chaos, Squalor, Filth by Kim Brenneman

I can no longer get to that link but thankfully I had pasted it in an email before.

It was originally posted at LargeFamilyLogistics.net by Kim Brenneman.

Here's an email I sent to my friends about this post.....

From: Leslie Thompson
To: momsfriendshipcircle
Sent: Thursday, April 05, 2007 2:19 PM
Subject: Tough love about decluttering your house....
Crazy tough love, but GOOD. From http://www.largefamilylogistics.net/.

Sit back and take a moment to read this..... (some may not need it but I bet a few can use at least a bit of what she's saying...i can fo-sheezy)

Chaos, Squalor, Filth
Beyond Survival Series #8
Kim Brenneman

Warning: tough-love ahead, it might make you angry - if so, come back and read it again tomorrow and then again the next day until you can read it without being angry and without excuses.

It has come to my attention through various sources that there are many large homeschooling families living in chaos. These homes have clutter, they children don't have Afternoon Chore Time, the family rarely has a regular Cleaning Day, and the children are not required to do chores. In fact the mom herself isn't doing regular chores.

Ummmmm, I don't get it. Isn't this asking for a visit from DHS? I believe it falls under "neglect". Living in a pig sty is unacceptable. This is the opposite of being a woman of God. Go read Proverbs 31 and Titus 2 again.Maybe you don't see what your home really looks like? Take a glance around right now. Is it a slight mess that will take ten minutes to clear? Did it get dusted and vacuumed recently? This is normal life. Surprise visitors don't typically notice or care about this type of clutter. Their home looks the same. They are here to visit with you and your family.

Slightly worse but not horrendous yet is if the room you are in requires an hour of tidying before you can get to cleaning it but it has been cleaned in the last month. This is getting worse and hopefully it is only in the room you are currently in and doesn't apply to the whole house. You need to get your Maintenance Plan working. Your surprise visitor might raise an eyebrow privately but will understand because they are here to visit you and your family and after all they have had times in life when they haven't been exactly on top of things.

My eyes have recently been opened to a true worst case scenario scene. Does this describe your home? In order to get your home tidy, do you need an empty dumpster or two for the trash that litters your floor, at least ten large boxes from each room for clutter to take to the Goodwill Store, a week long session for simply cleaning one level of your home (not including windows that haven't been cleaned since you moved into the home), and three trips to the laundry mat to catch up?

This is not good at all. If you have a lot of clutter your home will never be clean. Clutter is hiding dirt; you can clean for days but your home won't be clean or look clean until you rid it of clutter. Your home is dirty underneath and around the clutter. You might not see clutter but others do. Your family and guests need to be able to walk in the door. Yes, walk in the door withou pushing clutter with it. They need to be able to walk in your home without tripping (knee high piles of clutter need to be purged). Guests should not be greeted by some sort of foreign unpleasant odor (do you know what your home smells like?). People should be able to sit down on a chair.

Chairs are not clutter holders. The chair should not have a dust cloud rising when sat upon. If a guest needs to use your rest room it must not be frightening to them. It should be clean and the appropriate bathroom things handy (toilet paper, hand towel). Get the dirty clutter out of your bathroom including the decaying magazines and books. Do you have piles of recycling? Either get a system and use it or don't recycle, your family and guests don't want to see it spread about your house. That's not recycling or saving pop can money, it is trash collecting and it shouldn't be going on in your home if you can't manage a system for it.

When you greet guests or when your husband and family walk in the door, give them a welcoming picture of loveliness and your clutter is not lovely. You might know where your stuff is in all that clutter but what does it look like?! If you know where your specific clutter is your brain is filled with clutter keeping and not more important things. Your home management should not require that kind of brain power. Maybe you think it's clean but in reality it is not. When you clean and organize it must not just look better than when you started.

That would fall under "lick and a promise" or "a half-way job" or "a slacker job". If this is you, read on please and start praying for help. Remember Philippians 4:13 I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me. Pray for eyes to see what your home really looks like. You can dig out. God will help you. Pray for wisdom and pray without ceasing.I will say that there are extra clean years when we get our homes clean and have time for beautiful decorating projects and there are years when our cleanliness standards are lowered because of a tired pregnant mama, not enough help, or illness in the family. BUT living in regular squalor is unacceptable. When a dirty messy home happens it should be a very temporary situation.

The first items on the daily agenda towards recovery should be Kitchen, Bathrooms, and Floors. Those are important for the safety of your family. Not only to fend off your neighbors anonymous call to DHS about your children living in filth but because filth invites bugs, rodents, mold, allergies, and disease. And by not teaching your children to be clean and tidy you are in essence teaching them to live like pigs. What kind of life preparation is that? "Go forth and live like pigs!" I don't think so, ladies. Leave the dirty chaos behind with the old man. Renew your mind, your goal as a Christian woman is to live Noble and Beautiful lives.I know you don't feel good. I myself have been ill along with my family, I feel at about 50% right now, but doing a little bit of work at a time will add up and soon your home will be clean. Then you must keep it clean.

You must have a maintenance plan. We call ours Afternoon Chore Time. Sometimes our Afternoon Chore Time is in the morning. And sometimes it happens after supper. The important thing is that chore time happens daily.If you have only little children, require them to help you and make it fun! This is teaching them to enjoy work and appreciate cleanliness while they are little. You do not want big kids who have learned a lazy work ethic; this will be hard to cure.

If it's too late and you have big kids who are lazy I think the best thing to do is to read Proverbs to them and require them to read it aloud to the family. Do this at meal times. Pray for wisdom and creativity in teaching them. Be an encourager and set an example. Start cleaning and keeping things clean. TEach them what clean looks like. When someone violates a clean area call him on it and require him to restore that area.

If you are living in squalor you must make changes. No more excuses. If you're ill or exhausted just do a little bit at a time and take a rest between each task but pray for strength and keep moving forward.

Start here with this list, do one new thing, go slow and get good at that one thing, then add another.

1. Assign a day of the week as the Cleaning Day. On this day, the goal is to get every room of the house dusted and vacuumed.

2. Assign an hour of the day for Daily Chores and require your children to do chores with you no matter how old they are. Little children can put trash in a bag, "wash dishes" with you, and wipe things with a wet rag. If you have a large family, I know for a fact that your family makes a tremendous mess every day. Chores that some families do on a weekly basis your family will need to do DAILY. Did you catch that? I said daily. This might be part of your problem. You might be thinking weekly when you need to be thinking daily. That means clean the bathroom daily. Sweep the kitchen and under your dining table daily. It might mean vacuuming a certain room daily or cleaning your well-used stove daily. Of course dishes should be washed daily no matter if you are a one person family or 16. If you are in dire straights, switch to paper and plastic for a season and throw it away. It's less expensive than a cleaning service.

3. Establish Table Chores for your family. It is unsanitary to leave food out, have piles of dirty dishes, to put your baby in a dirty high chair, and have a kitchen floor that would keep a small animal well fed. Give each person a chore to do after every meal.

4. Declutter regularly if not daily. I do it all the time. We declutter when we do the laundry. Some goes in the trash, some goes in the box for the second hand store. We declutter every week when we clean a room. We have a box for items we don’t need or want in our home and when it’s full, it goes to the van for our next trip to town.

This is how you maintain against the clutter collection. If you need a serious declutter and organize then pick a room and go through it with tough-love. Make rules and post them, have your child who is learning to read recite it to you while you do the work. You will need the reminders. Teach these rules to all of your children.Is it useful? Needed currently? Loved? Beautiful? Promote your family values? Do you have more of this item than necessary? Is it taking up needed space? Do other people need this item more than your family? Does it create problems in your home?Is it a dust collector?Do you hate to clean it or around it?Does your husband hate it?Is your excuse for living in squalor "I'm too busy homeschooling. Either I can homeschool or keep my house clean, I can't do both."

This is a myth. And it's BUSTED.There are plenty of homeschooling families that teach their children, keep a clean home, and practice hospitality. Homeschooling is not an excuse for an unkept home and I never want to hear it again. Homeschooling is messy but teaching your children to clean up a mess and keep their things tidy is part of their education! Let me say it again, teaching your children to clean after themselves, to keep their things tidy, that everything has a place and everything should be in its place, and to regularly do physical work such as pushing a vacuum, mopping a floor, or cleaning a toilet is homeschooling. It is education.

What good is raising brainiac children who don't know how to work? They might know a lot of things, they might know how to teach themselves, but do they know how to DO? Can they know something and then go do it? If not, your homeschooling is for naught. They will not be employable, or able to succeed at a job without an attitude of initiative. They will certainly not have the get-up-and-go to be an entrepreneur. They will personally live like the pig they grew up as and won't be able to have a hospitable home. Your daughters will struggle with home management, hospitality, and serving the church. They will be book-smart but useless.

This is what the education establishment generally produces without the effort of foresighted and involved parents. Homeschoolers must not follow that same pattern. Homeschooling is not school at home. Homeschooling is teaching how to live as a Christian. (Deut. 6:5 and Mark 12:29) Moms, you must teach your children to work and it starts in the home when they are small. God does not mean for His homeschooled families to live in squalor with that lame excuse. That is lazy, defeatist thinking. Christianity is not a selfish religion. It is other-oriented. It is about serving others and ministering to needs. Raising super-smart children who live with their nose in a book is not raising them to practice Chrisitianity. Maybe they are filled with theology but do they know how to live it? It starts with serving each other in the home, then serving the church through hospitality, follow that up with serving others in your local community.

Is your family doing these things? Or are you too busy schooling them that when you see new neighbors move in you and the children just watch out the window for a bit of distraction in your day. There are lots of books, seminars, and organizing professionals to help you declutter and clean. There are books that will tell you why you collect clutter and how to let go of it. Have a friend or sister over to help and do one room at a time, but get the clutter out. Give it away. There are lots of needy people in your community who would be glad for your clutter. Let go of it, you don't need it in your house.

Collecting clutter is selfish. Do you have knick knacks that create cleaning work for your family? Get rid of them. Dirty knick knacks are ugly and don't glorify God at all. When we're going to add a new baby at our house that is one of my prepartory things, I go around with a box and fill it with any decorations that are going to create more work. A baby year is not a year for decorating. There will be time for that later when you have time to manage the decor. You feel guilty when you look at dirty knick-knacks, your family doesn't want to see them or clean them, the dirt embarrasses your husband, and your guests try really hard to look beyond them because they want to love you. Let it go. Give it away.Books: If you're not mad at me yet for harsh words, you will be soon. I know that homeschoolers love love love books. We also tend to collect curriculum.

If certain program doesn't work for one child, maybe it will work for another one in the line up. Sound familiar? And soon it stacks up, overflows our bookshelves and cupboards. Children don't put things back and it stacks up. Hmmmm, how do I know this? You ought to see our library right now. No, I am not the perfect person and my family is not the perfect family. I have had to learn to let go of things I might need someday. My husband has been very helpful.

For every thing that comes into our house, he wants that equal amount to go out. It's a good rule to practice. He's a wise man. Another thing he tells me is this, "Somebody is going to wake up tomorrow morning and make _____ all day long. Then somebody is going to sell that in their store and you can go buy it if you ever need it again. In fact, it will probably be an improved version." Ladies, this also applies to curriculum. You do not need to horde it. Give it to a needy person in your homeschool group. Sell it. But don't stash it in a stack. You won't remember that you had it and if you do, you won't remember where you stashed it.

There are homeschool parents writing new and better curriculum for all subjects all the time. Give your stacks of unused stuff away. When someone gives you their curriculum, be selective and take only what you will use immediately and then give it away.

Here is a plan to help stop the book and curriculum madness.

1. Go on a buying hiatus until you have purged your stacks, shelves, and cupboards and have only what are positive you will use.

2. If you have more books than shelves, don't buy another book until you have bought shelves for what you own. Figure out how much you spend a month on books and apply that towards shelves. Build them yourself with your children - it's callled shop class. Shop garage sales and second hand stores. Visit furnitures stores and find out when they hold sales. Just stop the book buying and focus on shelving.

3. Before you buy any new curriculum call your homeschool mentors and ask them what they know about it. Pray about it. Talk to your husband about it. Wait, don't buy impulsively. It will still be there tomorrow. Your child has survived this long without it, he can wait one more day or week. This is good stewardship and home management.

4. Organize your books by type and put a label on the spine to identify where in your libray the book should belong. (This is a project really high on my To Do List)

All in all, get your priorities right. As a daughter of your Heavenly Father, sister in the priesthood of believers, having the Holy Spirit as your counselor, home keeper, wife to the man God gave you, mother to blessings from God, being called to serve Christ through hospitality (Romans 12:13; 1 Peter 4:9; Hebrews 13:1,2; 1 Timothy 5:10), and making your home a shining light on a hill with its foundation built on a the solid rock of Christ, you have to get your act together and serve others (starting with your own family) with your home to the glory of God.

Q: What is the chief end of man?
A: Man's chief end is to glorify God,1 and to enjoy him forever

1. 1 Corinthians 10:31.

Whether therefore ye eat, or drink, or whatsoever ye do, do all to the glory of God. Romans 11:36. For of him, and through him, and to him, are all things: to whom be glory for ever. Amen.

2. Psalm 73:24-26.

Thou shalt guide me with thy counsel, and afterward receive me to glory. Whom have I in heaven but thee? and there is none upon earth that I desire beside thee. My flesh and my heart faileth: but God is the strength of my heart, and my portion for ever.John 17:22, 24. And the glory which thou gavest me I have given them; that they may be one, even as we are one... Father, I will that they also, whom thou hast given me, be with me where I am; that they may behold my glory, which thou hast given me: for thou lovedst me before the foundation of the world.Your chief end is not to homeschool your children for the smartest brain possible.

Mom, your duty as home keeper is more than filling your children's heads with knowledge. First of all, you need to love God, glorify Him, and enjoy Him forever. Then you need to call your children to fall in behind you and follow you in that endeavor.

This is quoted from Kim Brenneman at Large Family Logistics. Kim, I hope you don't mind! I posted it because of how very much it has helped me and my sanity!!!!