S2S Sisters: "The Power of a Well Ordered Home" by Mariel Frost

Our prayer is that you will be filled with the knowledge of His will, strengthened with all might according to His glorious power. Good afternoon, ladies. So nice to have each of you here this afternoon, and we are coming to you this afternoon. I'm coming to you this afternoon from Western Massachusetts. My name is Doreen Kurtz, and I want to welcome our speaker today, Marielle Frost.

She is planning to share with us on the power of a well-ordered home. You might recognize Marielle from other talks on this platform. Marielle has shared the Born Crucified talk as well as another one, and I can't quite remember that title at this moment, but excellent talks as well that you can go back and listen to when you have time. I'm looking forward to listening in on this this afternoon.

I'm in the thick of raising my family right now, and I feel like there's going to be a lot of good things for me to hear this afternoon. I'd like to read the talk description of Marielle's talk here.

It says, "There is power in a well-ordered home. It serves as a platform for hospitality and a launchpad for ministry. It is a sanctuary of rest and a source of peace. A well-ordered home isn't perfect or fancy, but it functions smoothly like a well-oiled machine. It produces more fruit for the kingdom than individual family members could achieve alone. A well-ordered home is built on teamwork, servant leadership, and right priorities. By God's grace, we are all capable of creating a well-ordered home."

Marielle has much experience in running a home and raising a family, and much experience in caring for others. She's been a blessing in my life many times when we visited, and also a support to Joe and I in our journey here in Massachusetts. So God bless you today, Marielle, as you share with us. And I would like to have another word of prayer for you before you start, and then you can just go ahead from there. Maybe one more thing I'll say yet is that for those of you that are new on this platform, there's a question-and-answer session after Marielle's talk when you can ask her or comment on things that she's shared.

We love to see your face if you want to turn on your video. You will not be recorded if you do not turn on your video. You can also submit questions and comments through the chat box, and you'll find the button for that at the bottom of your screen.

So be thinking about things that come to your mind that you would like to ask her when she's finished. All right, let's pray. Pray, Marielle.

Father, thank you for this opportunity. Thank you for Marielle and her journey and her faithfulness to You, Lord.

I ask that You will just abundantly bless her this afternoon. Please pour out Your Holy Spirit on her afresh right now. Father, I pray that You would honor her walk of faith and service to You, and that she will just be given each word and each thought as she needs it here, Lord. And we ask that this talk could offer an abundance of hope to the listeners and that we could learn something new today, Father. Please bless each woman on this call today and their hunger and thirst for righteousness.

Lord, You promise that when we diligently seek You, that we'll find You, and that You won't get after us for asking for wisdom. So Lord, I pray that You would just bless and sustain Marielle. Father, we realize that she has spent much time caring for Mike right now and all the other things that she's responsible for. Father, we lift her up to You in Jesus' name. Amen.

Amen. Thank you so much, Doreen. I just really feel God's presence and feel like I'm, yeah, walking a little bit on holy ground here, which is a blessing. Yeah, there's so much to be said about a well-ordered home, and there's so much that's already been said. And yeah, there's books and books about child training and all of that. And I'm not going to cover everything. I am going to go through some practical points, but first, I'm just going to kind of lay a foundation and biblical foundation and just do a little vision casting. Then we'll get into some more practical stuff. And I would really love it if, especially when we're going through the more practical stuff, some of you ladies that are tuned in live would make a note of some of the ways that you've applied these things and also other ideas that don't get mentioned because there's so much that could be gone over, because I think it would be really good if we heard from each other during the question-and-answer period.

So all right, let's just launch right in. Back in 2008, two researchers at the University of Pennsylvania published a study called The Paradox of Declining Female Happiness. I'm going to read you the abstract from that study. It says, "By many objective measures, the lives of women in the United States have improved over the past 35 years. Yet we show that measures of subjective well-being indicate that women's happiness has declined both absolutely and relative to men. The paradox of women's declining relative well-being is found across various datasets, measures of subjective well-being, and is pervasive across demographic groups and industrialized countries."

In other words, according to this study, women's lives have steadily improved since the 1970s. Wages for women have increased, career options have expanded, educational opportunities are wide open. Women now have control over their fertility, and modern appliances have set women free from the so-called drudgery of domestics. And so women are still less happy now than they were in the 1970s, and that was kind of the point of this paper in 2008.

Here's another example of a similar phenomenon. This is a book that I picked up in a thrift store. It's called Home Alone America. And I'm just going to read to you what it says on the back of the dust jacket here. It says, "Eberstaedt offers hard data proving that absent parents are the common denominator of many recent epidemics. Eberstaedt reopens the forbidden question of just how much children need their parents, especially their mothers. What is the cumulative effect of the modern adult exodus from the home? Has the United States already reached a tipping point in this society of unattended children and teenagers? And if so, what does that mean for our future?" And both that study and the book were published almost 10 years ago.

As we know, things have gone from bad to much worse.

Of course, none of this is really surprising to any of us. What's interesting is that these authors are not conservative Christians.

And yeah, yet they're recognizing that there's definitely an undeniable consequence of the exodus of women from their homes. It's affecting children, it's affecting society, and it's affecting the women themselves. They're no longer as happy as they were. To many of you listening to this, probably the 1970s seems like ancient history, and the social decline we're seeing all around us is just kind of par for the course. Some of you have gotten so used to it, bad as it really is, that it's lost a lot of its shock value because you grew up with all of this. And you might get tired of hearing old ladies like me say, you know, "Wow, things have changed so much, and it's changing so quickly."

And the chances are that if you're listening to this, you were raised in a home with a stay-at-home mom and a reasonable amount of order. You know it was a good thing. But if you're a young mom yourself, you're probably honestly not sure how important staying at home with your children really is.

It might seem kind of inconsequential. After all, in a world as messed up as ours is, wouldn't it make more sense for you to limit the number of children and do something more important, maybe delegate some of the homemaking and make a difference in the world?

I get that. And I have wrestled over the years with feeling like just providing a home for my family is kind of irrelevant. But I just want to make the point today that it's not irrelevant. It's actually very, very important. And sometimes it may feel like you're just buried in obscurity, changing diapers and wiping noses, but really you are making a huge difference, not only in the kingdom of God, but in the world in general.

And I know also that for some of you, maybe you came from a stable, well-ordered home or what looked like that on the outside. And I'm very sorry if this is the case for you. But sometimes a well-ordered home is a cover for some really serious moral disorder. And sometimes there's the temptation to just get disgusted with that form of godliness that lacks power, and you're ready to just throw out the baby with the bathwater.

So I just want to give a little bit of my own story, maybe tell you why I feel I'm kind of qualified to plead for you to take a fresh look at being a homemaker and getting excited about it.

First of all, I was born in 1970. I grew up as a non-Christian during the years that were cited earlier as the baseline for the Female Happiness Study. And following all the normal trends, I was encouraged by my parents to pursue any path in life that I wanted. I dreamed of being a professional something. I thought maybe at first I'd be a professional astronaut, or then I wanted to be the producer of science documentaries.

I considered being a college professor or maybe a corporate executive. And I was given an excellent education and encouraged to do something, something great. But before I got very far down that path, God intervened. I was born again when I was 21, and being a Christian was a major paradigm shift. I was truly a new creature in Christ, but I still wanted to do something great. I just figured now I would do something great for God. I would be a professional Christian and use my education and my strengths to impact the world.

After five years of marriage, Mike and I were finally ready to have children. By this time, we were taking the Bible seriously enough to concede that I really should be a stay-at-home mom. So I quit work, and we had the perfect family. We had one little boy and one little girl, and I was prepared to just kind of scale back slightly and do something great on a more local level.

And again, God intervened. We wound up giving God total control of our family planning. And over the next 18 years, He gave us 10 more children through birth and adoption. This was a huge game changer for me. Suddenly, I was launched into a job for which I had absolutely no training and no experience. I never even did any babysitting, to speak of, when I was growing up. And here I was surrounded by lots and lots of children. I soon realized that I was going to have to make this my career. I was going to have to apply myself to this task of raising a family in much the same way I had planned to excel in some professional career.

Now, the transformation from where I was when I started being a housekeeper to where I am now was not always easy. It wasn't always smooth or pretty. But as a result of the years I have spent kind of buried in obscurity of birthing, raising, and educating my family, I have become fully convinced that being a homemaker and doing it well is a worthy career.

I am convinced that it has been every bit as challenging and rewarding as any career I thought I wanted to pursue. And it's also been much more humbling and refining. And it's also, I'm convinced, made a difference for the kingdom of God.

The bottom line is I have realized that being great isn't nearly as important as being faithful. The secular world says, "Go do something great." The Christian world often says, "Go do something great for God." And I'm convinced that God is really saying, "Be faithful where you are. I'm great, and that's enough."

Looking around at the world today, we see the effects of dysfunction and trauma and disorder everywhere. We certainly can't fix all the world's problems by being homemakers. But I do believe that we can give the world some stable people with a heart to serve others. We can provide a sanctuary of rest in the midst of all the busyness. We can provide a place of peace amidst all the craziness. We can provide a place of hospitality for strangers and for friends. We can provide that launchpad for our families to enter this lost and dying world and minister grace and peace.

We can't be the answer, or we can be the answer that the world is looking for, even if when they hear that answer, they don't think that it's the answer they're looking for. Mother Teresa put it this way. She said, "If you want to change the world, go home and love your family." And I think she was probably onto something.

So the title of this session is The Power of a Well-Ordered Home. And I really do believe that a well-ordered home is powerful. But just staying at home is not the key. The power is in the order. A well-ordered home is consistent with the very nature of God. When we catch a vision for creating order out of chaos, we have caught a vision for partnering with God in the work He's doing in the world.

We all know that God is a God of order. We are all familiar with 1 Corinthians 14:40 that says, "Let all things be done decently and in order." Additionally, we know that the Old Testament is full of orderly instructions. And even in the New Testament, we see that there's a lot of ordinal or in-order exhortations like "Clean first the inside of the cup" or "Seek ye first the kingdom of God."

But I want to take a minute and lay a biblical foundation for order by going back to Genesis chapter 1. I'm just going to read the first five verses. "In the beginning, God created the heaven and the earth. And the earth was without form and void, and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. And God said, 'Let there be light.' And there was light. And God saw the light that it was good. And God divided the light from the darkness. And God called the light day, and the darkness He called night. And the evening and the morning were the first day."

So in the beginning, God created something, but it was without shape. It was empty, and it was dark. Then God began to speak. He spoke, and there was light. Next, God began to divide. He divided the light from the darkness. Then God called. He called the light day, and the darkness He called night.

So God brought order out of the chaos. God spoke, and there was substance where there had been nothing. God divided, and there was structure, rather, where there had been formlessness. And He called, and things were named. Once there are names, there can be communication. And once there is communication, there can be relationship.

And we see this same pattern repeated again in the New Testament through the life of Jesus Christ. Jesus created. He created wine out of water. It was His first miracle. He created peace in the midst of that storm. He created new creatures out of fallen men. And then Jesus divided. He divided history itself between BC and AD. He divides the sheep from the goats and the believers from the unbelievers. Jesus also called. He called His disciples. He called out demons. He called out sin.

We are made in God's image. So is it any wonder that we long to follow in that example? We create, we divide, we organize, we order our world. It's what people do. We bring order to a forest, and we call it a park. We bring order to a field, and we call it a garden. We bring order to colors, and we call it art.

And when we bring order to a house where a bunch of people live and grow up, we are creating a well-ordered home. Being keepers at home is how we married women find our place in this grand scheme of things.

Titus 2 makes it clear that we are keepers of the home front. We are its guardian, its custodian. The word keeper there is very similar to what you'd have with a gatekeeper or a shopkeeper. So our homes are the corner of the world that we have been assigned to guard and to manage.

It's our place to create, to divide, and to call. So how do we create? We create life, literally, obviously. And then we also bring it about spiritually by travailing for our children. We divide. We divide right from wrong, appropriate from inappropriate. We organize our homes. We call. We call out sin. We call our children into adulthood. We teach our children to name things and to communicate with the world around them.

All right. So that's my foundation. Now I want to switch gears and go into the more practical side of a well-ordered home.

In preparation for this talk, I reached out to quite a few women and asked them to share wisdom from their years of homemaking. And I was amazed and blessed by how much overlap there was in their responses. There were so many points that were repeated in so many different ways. And I found this encouraging because it means that a well-ordered home is neither mysterious nor out of reach. It is not just for the few who have that right organized personality or the right cultural background. It's really not rocket science. It can be taught, and it can be learned.

I took what these ladies had to share and combined it with a bunch of my own thoughts and made about 30 slides or so that I'm going to share and comment on. I know some of you are listening, so you won't see the slides, but they're just very basic.

I'll read each one, and they just give the rest of you something to look at besides me. And as I compiled these notes, I realized there are at least three dimensions to be considered in a well-ordered home. There's probably more, but these are the three that stood out to me. There's the physical realm. There's order in the idea of values, and then there's order in authority structures. So I'll just comment on these briefly, and then I'll share my screen.

Okay. When a home is in order, we usually mean that it is neat and uncluttered. Some people just love this kind of order, and they excel at creating it. I was recently given a beautiful book all about creative ways to store things in cute little cubbies and shelves and labels, and you can organize every room. And some people are great at that, and it really is amazing. But perfection is not really the goal here. What is more important when we talk about order in the physical environment is that there would be peacefulness and that there would also be sustainability, I think, for the long haul. So if you're not one of those people that loves to organize things, then I think you can still have a well-ordered home.

But this is part of it, for sure.

Okay. The other thing is that there's order and values. This has to do with how we spend our time and how we prioritize our life. It has a lot to do with time management. I know some women who do not have the cleanest house around, but they get a lot done. And the reason is because they prioritize service, they prioritize education and creativity, and they do it well.

Lastly, there's a need for order in regards to authority. Having a good, healthy grasp of the authority structure that God can bless is very important. Having clear, healthy lines of authority in our home is key to having order and peace.

So I hope we can touch on all of these dimensions, both directly and indirectly, as we go through these slides. "A routine makes everything flow a lot better. The children know what is expected, and it brings security." All right. So this was a quote from one of the sisters, and I think it is the single most important and foundational thing when it comes to a well-ordered home. Almost every single one of the women that contributed mentioned this in some way, shape, or form. It has been scientifically proven that children are happier when they have a predictable routine. Human beings actually have biological clocks which are heavily reliant on external cues to be set properly. So with a routine, a child begins to know when they should start feeling hungry, and they know when they should start feeling sleepy.

If you have a particular time when your child takes a nap, that's when they'll start exhibiting the symptoms of needing a nap, if you will. And so if you start imposing some order on their daily rhythms, it's actually going to help them as they get older, and they will be less cranky. Predictable routines have actually been found to reduce cortisol levels. Cortisol is that stress chemical or whatever in you, hormone. So when children know what to expect, they are literally less stressed.

I should mention that there's a difference between a routine and a schedule, but both are equally effective in this area. A routine is when you do something the same way in basically the same order over and over again. And a schedule is simply a routine that is time-sensitive.

I personally prefer a schedule. I always appreciated how the clock pushed me through my day. It still pushes me through my day. But especially during the years when I was up at night with little ones or whatever, there's days when you just don't feel like doing anything at all. And it's really good to have a schedule that keeps you on track. I found that helpful. Some find that rather stressful, but that's fine. You can stick with a predictable routine instead. That's just a personality difference, I'm sure.

However, I do think that the more you're trying to fit into a day, the more time-sensitive you need to be in order to make sure that nothing falls through the cracks. That's definitely true when you're homeschooling because you want to get around to everybody. And it's easy if you're not following a schedule to miss things.

All right. One sister said, "Have a routine, but allow it to flex for sickness, disciplinary needs, etc." Yeah, I've actually found that a schedule or routine is the best way to teach flexibility. Sometimes people object to a routine or a schedule because they feel like they want to be flexible. But I dare say that the absence of all routine is just disorder. It's not really flexibility at all. You need to know what you're flexing from. Your children need to know what you're flexing from in order to learn flexibility. Isabelle's smiling. She's my oldest daughter, so she knows all that.

Okay. Let's see here. How do I click to my next slide?

Hold on. All right. "Start your day with Jesus. The importance of this one simple point was reiterated in many different ways by many different sisters. This theme of a mother maintaining a good attitude and peace in her heart just came out as being of paramount importance, and I really think it is too. Prioritizing personal devotions is just key to having a well-ordered home because you have to start with a well-ordered heart. And this really isn't always easy, but it's worth striving for. One sister had this suggestion. She said, "Sit your toddler down and read your devotions out loud. This teaches reverence for God's word, and it trains the little ones in sitting still."

Another sister said, "Rise before dawn and cry for help." That is, get up before the rest of the family and spend time reading the word, praying, and planning the day. The children have said it was very important to them as they grew up to come out of their rooms in the morning and see mom in the word. They have duplicated that pattern.

Another sister said, "Be grounded in the Lord. Find your identity in Christ. Don't compare yourself to others. This will make you peaceful and confident in what you do, and the peace will trickle down to the children." Another one said, "Keep your heart and attitude pure." Of course, we need to be especially vigilant at certain times of the month. It's easy to get testy, but just say you're sorry when it's necessary.

And remember that a cheerful attitude just influences the whole household.

"Eat meals together as much as possible and at regularly scheduled times." This was also on the top of the list of things that were mentioned over and over again. And it doesn't really sound like a huge organizational tool, but it actually is.

If the family knows what time to gather, you don't need to chase everybody down. And as I've already mentioned, children know when to start feeling hungry, and therefore they're less cranky. And it just smooths things out if you can count on meals at a regular time. And also, if you eat them together, the dining room table becomes this amazing, valuable place of debriefing. It's where you can discuss plans, and experiences can be shared, and you can process disappointments and all kinds of things. So it becomes a really valuable galvanizing tool for the family unit.

One sister had the suggestion about mealtimes that you should sing as a family before meals. And I think that's a great suggestion. We haven't ever done that, actually. But it does bring out the point that gathering, not just for meals, but gathering for worship is important. And we've always just sung our songs at family devotions in the evening.

Okay. Structure, the stress, is the next point. What this means is not all parts of your day need to be highly structured. But if there are particular parts of your day that are really stressful, those are the times that are crying out for more structure.

So look around at your day, figure out what parts of the day cause the most stress, and then impose some order in those areas. Here's an example from my own experience. So the first half of our family was born in the space of six years and consisted of four boys that were all stacked on top of each other and two girls that were five years apart. So our household was high, high energy. And to make matters worse, it seemed that little frosts just lacked the sense to slow down when they got tired, and instead, they just started gearing up and moving faster.

And that made it so that evenings became a time of stress and conflict. And if Mike wasn't there, it was actually a nightmare. So we established a formal bedtime routine. First, everyone got changed and brushed their teeth. Then we read a chapter book together. And every single night, when the reading was done, we would say, "Bathroom in bed." And that meant that they were to go to the bathroom and get themselves in bed and then wait there for Mike and I to make the rounds to each bedside and sing their song and rub their back and say goodnight. And once they had had that little routine done, they were to stay there in their bed.

And this just became a very predictable and manageable routine. Everyone knew their part, and it brought peace to an otherwise chaotic time of the day. And it was also a very special time of the day for connecting one-on-one with each one of the children. I must say, it took some time, but it was worth it.

Okay. Next, start your school day right. I find that, well, whoopsie. Hold on. There we go.

I am a big proponent of having an orderly school schedule. I know not everybody homeschools, but I did and do. And I think that we need to remember that although school is different than homeschooling and homeschooling isn't going to try and duplicate a school, it is more flexible. It is a little bit more organic, if you will. I think our children still deserve to have us be structured and professional about teaching them.

And yeah, I think that starting our school day right can be a big part of it. It doesn't have to be kind of chaotic or haphazard so people don't know where to find their books or don't know when school is supposed to start or whatever. So the way we started is with group time. We start at a very specific time, 8 o'clock every morning, and we gather in the school room. And later, they might disperse to wherever they'd like. Some of my dyslexic children did school sitting in trees. But at the very least, we started school together in the school room. We do stretches. We memorize scripture. We go over the day's events, and we pray.

And then we start our individual school time, and I have a set time with each one of my students and whatever.

Yeah, other sisters rather mentioned similar things. One sister said, "Start the school day with Bible memory, a Bible story, or a chapter book. Read around the breakfast table, whatever." Okay. Use structured playtimes as a tool. Have specific toys for specific times.

There's a lot of good thoughts on this out there. Things like blanket time, where you have a blanket, and you put your toddler down with a little basket of toys or books, and teach your toddler that during blanket time, they have to stay on the blanket. It's like a little playpen that goes with you everywhere you go.

And it can work great if you invest a little bit of time in training your toddler to stay on that blanket during that set amount of time. This can buy you all kinds of time when you're schooling children, especially, because you can set them on their blanket. They know that's where they're going to be. They're using their specific little blanket time toys. And maybe you even set a timer. As soon as that timer goes off, they know they're free, and they run and they go get the snack that they was already prepared and set out for them or whatever. And you can focus with your first grader who's learning how to read or whatever.

Another thing that we used some back in the days when everybody seemed like they were piled up on top of each other and getting in each other's way in the afternoons maybe was to do what we called stations.

We would set up different activities at different parts of the house. And so the Legos might be over here, and coloring might be over there, and the train set over here. And we would set the timer for 15 or 20 minutes, and each child would just spend time playing by themselves at one of those stations, and then we would switch. And it just offered a little bit enough structure, enough variety to kind of ease through some different times of the day. We didn't use that all the time, but it could buy us a little bit of peace and order when needed.

Another idea in regards to toys is to rotate your toys, to just take some of the toys out of circulation for maybe six months or something. And when the Legos come back into circulation, it's suddenly like a brand new toy, and it will grab their interest a lot more. And certainly, fewer toys around means less mess. So anything that you can do to structure toys is kind of helpful. Then there's just not everything everywhere.

All right. One sister said this, "You don't want a messy house you can't invite guests into or one that makes you feel grouchy. But neither does it need to be perfect. Lower your standards in the areas that don't really matter."

So that's really good. Another sister said, "A little organizing and a good vacuum can do wonders in 30 minutes." And it's so true. Just getting things in order quickly can be very helpful. Several sisters mentioned things like cleaning up toys a game. "Let's see how much we can do before the timer goes off," and just everybody rushing around like you're chickens with your heads cut off and see what you can do. And it's true. The house may not be clean, but it is cleaner. And sometimes that is just what the doctor ordered.

Assign chores and don't switch too often. So I have done this for years. The backbone of our work is done during what we call 5 o'clock chore time. The fact that the chores are done at a set time helps with quality control, I find, because if you've assigned a child to sweep the floor and you haven't set a time for them to do that, it's really hard to go back and check and make sure that they did a good job because somebody might have walked through with muddy boots since they did it. And yeah, there's just not a whole bunch of accountability there. So having it all done at the same time is nice. We always like to do it at 5 o'clock because that's kind of the crazy time of the day anyway.

It's just before dad is coming home. The house is clean as we transition into supper time and evening routine and whatever.

Let's see here. Oh yeah, also not switching them up too frequently, especially for those 5 o'clock chores. We would still keep them for six months or so because that allows for mastery and ownership. And if so-and-so is assigned to sorting the laundry or sweeping the floor, they get good at it, and they really own it.

There's a lot of different ways to assign chores. There's chore charts. One sister said, "Chore charts help. If they want free time, ask, 'Have you done your chart?'" It frees up your mind, the mom's mind, when you don't need to remember what each child was supposed to do. So you're not just kind of randomly giving assignments on any given day, but you know what they're supposed to do.

And we've used a lot of different creative ways to assign jobs over the years. For other jobs that are rotating on a shorter cycle, like our cleanups, we have a chore wheel. There's maybe five jobs involved in doing the kitchen cleanup in the evening. And so that changes weekly, and we just turn the chart to show who's supposed to do it, the dishwashing or the table or whatever, each week.

Yeah, there's lots of ideas out there. I think you can get on Pinterest and get all kinds of really cute ideas for assigning chores.

One key, though, to chores also is to have children start helping before they're helpful. One of our 5 o'clock chores that was just a go-to for years and years and years, and it was always filled by the youngest member of the family, was empty the little trash cans. So they would go around the house, get the little trash cans, dump them into the bigger trash can. And so they're helping.

Okay.

Back to toys here. Get children into the habit of picking up their toys and keeping the house reasonably tidy before going to bed. Again, this may be a personality thing. This was a sister that said that specifically, but I know I do this every single night. Whether I'm tired or not, I leave the house neat. And that's because I'm a morning person. And when I wake up in the morning, if I see a really messy house that needs to be neatened, it's really hard for me to take the energy of my morning, because that's when I feel energized, and put it into my devotional life, because what I really want to do is neaten up the living room.

So I do that at night when I'm tired. And then when I wake up, I feel free to go do the things that really do matter to me, which is spending time with the Lord. I also think that waking up to a big mess can be awfully depressing, especially on Monday morning. Monday mornings are always hard. We always call them extra grace required days.

And if you wake up to a mess, you can be feeling overwhelmed before you even got to the bathroom. And that's not good. So I think that it's a very good practice to just leave the house neat, and to have the children help with that is great.

One sister, I guess I don't have it here, said that oftentimes the dad would help with that process and would engage the children in it and try and make it fun and fast and all the rest of it. So that's great.

Okay. Sort laundry into smaller baskets and let each child fold and put away their own clothes. This was something from our house. A sister taught me this years ago. And at the time, what I was doing was maybe like a lot of you do. I was sorting and folding and putting away everybody's clothes so that their drawers would be neat. But I only had a few children, and I quickly saw that, you know what, I'm not going to be able to keep this up if I keep having children. And so one of our 5 o'clock chores is you dump all of the laundry on the couch, and one of the people is assigned to sorting that laundry into each person's little basket.

And it is true. I had to lower my standards because some people don't fold as well as others. But that's okay. It's duplicatable, and I could handle it for the next 30 years of my life.

KISS. This is an acronym dating back to my childhood. It means keep it simple, stupid. We don't usually allow the word stupid in our home, but I kind of like this acronym. Keep it simple, stupid is just like what I say to myself sometimes when I start getting overly visionary about the basics.

There's a time for elaborate plans and special events and things like that. But as a general rule, keeping life simple means keeping it more sustainable and more peaceful. And many sisters touched on this kind of a thing. Here's one quote she said, "Decide what you can handle and leave the rest, even if everyone else is doing it."

Another one, be willing to think differently than just how your mother did things. Change things up so that it works best for you. Yes. And this goes for different seasons in your own life too. Just because something was working two years ago doesn't mean that it's working the best now. Be able to tweak and adjust things as you go. This is really the key to having a peaceful, well-ordered home.

Another sister said, "When the children are little, make your garden a few raised beds. You still get the joy of growing things, but without the huge responsibility of a big garden." Okay. In the long run, routines and good habits multiply time and free up brain space.

This is another theme that was repeated often in different ways. Anything that limits the number of decisions that have to be made in the moment will free up your brain space and will probably wind up making you a more peaceful mom. Because when you're having to make a whole bunch of decisions on the fly, it can just be stressful. It taxes you, and it's harder to be all there for your children, for your relationships. And so whenever you can have routines or good habits that have already been put into place, it just frees up your brain, and that is valuable.

Yeah. And establishing good habits in your children too is really key. Things like saying thank you and please. I know we're all working to do that, but it really does make a difference. Just the other day, we were in the library, and my son said thank you, and the librarian made this huge big deal about it.

So just get your children in the habit of saying things like that. Get them in the habit of brushing their teeth and washing their hands before they come to the table. And those things just make it run smoothly in your house.

Tell people how to help.

This one slide has a whole bunch of related points. One sister said, "On busy days, it is frustrating for children if they don't have a clear picture of what needs to be done. They keep hoping for a break, but they are continually asked to do something else with no end in sight. Instead, make a list and allow the children to cross off the completed items. They are free when the list is done." That is a very good suggestion. There's something very satisfying about marking things off a to-do list.

Yeah. Sometimes it's just really key to have a list and let people know what you expect. And this is for unusual days, like days when you're getting ready for company or something like that. They may not know what all is needed to be done. It's not a normal school day or whatever. So make a list, maybe on the whiteboard in the schoolroom or whatever, and either assign it or let them see what's needed to be done. Because sometimes we're rushing around the house, and our dear family sees us and can tell that we're stressed out, and they want to help. But unfortunately, because they don't really know what needs to be done, they might just think that with all this stress and flurry, the safest, most efficient thing for me to do is to just run away and hide.

And so suddenly everybody withdraws, and you're the only crazy woman running around the house trying to get everything done, and you wonder what happened, right? Well, you just haven't told them how to help you. So do that. And another sister had a good point about lists. She said, "Making a to-do list doesn't mean you must get everything on it done. It's only putting on paper what needs to be done so your brain does not have to carry it all." And that's so true. You don't have to get stressed out about it. Just writing it down doesn't mean that you have to do it. It just takes it out of your brain.

Now, this brings us to the idea of delegating. And delegating is such a valuable skill. You need to receive from above and pass on down below. You're a link in a chain. And if you understand your place of authority in your home, you can delegate much better without feeling threatened by delegating things. Sometimes moms feel like if they ask their older children to do things for the younger ones, they'll somehow lose their place or whatever. But again, having that healthy sense of authority means you can do that without feeling personally threatened, but you also can do it without abdicating your authority. You're not giving this child full authority. You're just delegating to them. Anyway, the goal is to duplicate yourself.

The goal is to actually work yourself out of a job, really, is what you're trying to do. But you have to be careful not to abuse this because it's certainly not a way to get out of work. You also need to be very willing to be working shoulder to shoulder with your children.

And another point along this line is that I think it's really important for us to recognize that if you assign a task without giving explicit instructions on how to do it, then you have effectively given the children complete freedom to do it their way.

So if they wind up doing it in a way that you didn't expect, appreciate their effort. And if it's appropriate and you sense a teachable spirit, maybe you can offer advice on how to do it better or more easily the next time. But leave room for multiple ways for a task to be accomplished. And that will allow your child's heart to remain open to your suggestions. And if there is only one way that something should be done, then by all means, teach them how that way is before you expect them to do it.

And that's common sense. Okay. Have a set menu and keep meals simple.

So this relates back to a lot that's already been said. A set menu frees up your brain space. Simple meals are easier to delegate. One sister said, "Get children to help in the kitchen at a young age. A 12-year-old can learn to put a meal on the table with only a little help from mom."