How To Survive School Holidays

As much as it’s lovely to have the children home from school and getting to spend time with them as a family, it can also be a little daunting having whole blocks of time to fill with them. You may even wonder how you’re going to survive the school holidays! With 14 or more weeks holiday a year that's a lot of time to keep your children entertained.

This is particularly true if you usually work and either take annual leave to be with them, work flexibly or put self-employed work to one side during the school holidays. It’s very difficult to savour every moment when the house is a mess, you’re breaking up the 34th fight of the day, your income is potentially taking a hit and you’re fielding the 7,896th request for a snack!

Whether you are at home or going away these tips will help you get through the holidays with less stress

Simple Organisation Tips for Busy Families

Constantly forgetting a pound of a morning for non-uniform day? Living in a home filled with clutter? Rushing around like a lunatic to get to clubs / parents’ evenings / kids’ birthday parties? If all of this sounds familiar, you’re not alone. Keeping your family organised can be difficult.

Bring order to the chaos with these organisation tips for busy families

Preserving Memories: Tips for Storing Children's Artwork

It’s lovely to see your children’s creativity shining through in the form of their artwork. And certainly, those first pictures that they make at nursery or the cards created for special occasions such as Mother’s Day are always a treasure to keep. However, if they’re regularly coming home from school with pieces of artwork as well as creating more at home, you can soon find yourself drowning under piles of paper!

Whether at nursery or high school how do you store the best of your children's artwork?

The Hidden Rewards of Teaching Your Kids to Clean at an Early Age

Teaching your children to clean may seem like an impossible task, but by starting good habits at an early age, it can make your home a much more harmonious place to be. For starters, it lightens the mental load on the main person or people undertaking the housework, and if a clean and tidy home is important to you, it will also help with your mental health and wellbeing.

There are lots of reasons to encourage your children to clean from an early age

How To Leave For The School Run With Less Stress

Almost everyone that has had kids will know the feeling of frantically shouting, “shoes!” at your little one in a vague attempt to get them out of the house on time and on their way to school. Whether this is a regular occurrence in your house, or you’re fortunate that this is an infrequent happening, school run mornings can be stressful. However, there are certainly things that can be done to make leaving the house for school less stressful.

It is possible to make leaving for the school run less stressful

Efficiency in the Kitchen: The Power of Meal Planning

Meal planning is a great skill to get into the habit of. Not only does it help you to keep organised, particularly on those busy family nights when you’re juggling mealtimes with clubs, but it will also help you to save money by planning ahead and avoiding last minute shops and top ups. But where to begin with meal planning? This post covers the basics to get you started. 

Meal planning basics: I recommend against getting all the food out of the counter while you plan the meals

The Simple Way To Get Started With Decluttering Your Home

The term ‘decluttering’ seems to be everywhere at the moment, and with good reason. Many of us could lead a much simpler and more meaningful home life without items, objects, toot – indeed, clutter – getting in the way. Once we declutter, we can really feel a sense of accomplishment and achievement, and it gives better control over our homes.

Of course, we can’t live without certain objects, and many of our items also hold sentimental value, but the very definition of clutter is something which does not add value or purpose to your life. In essence, decluttering is about making room in your home and your life for things that really do have meaning for you.

With this in mind, here are my top 5 tips for decluttering your home:

Top 5 tips for decluttering your home

How To Recycle (Nearly) Everything

We all know that the best thing for the planet is to reduce the amount we buy. If we can reuse our shopping bags instead of getting new ones each time, for instance, it quickly makes a difference. Despite our best intentions though we live in a world that has got used to the convenience of single use and disposables. The tide might be turning but from coffee cups to packaging there is a long way to go. It isn't just small items either, it is often cheaper to buy a new washing machine, microwave or TV than to get an old one fixed. So what do you do with the broken one? And what about items in your house that you no longer need? This post runs through the options on how you can sell, giveaway and recycle as many of your unwanted belongings as possible whether they are broken or still usable. 

How to recycle, sell or giveaway items you no longer need and avoid adding to landfill

How often should you clean carpets at home?

Carpets are a great way to make your home feel cozy, but they accumulate dirt, dust and bacteria over time. Regular cleaning of carpets is crucial to maintain a healthy home environment, and this blog post will help your decide how often you should clean yours. 

It's not just about looking clean and removing unsightly stains. Regular carpet cleaning helps extend the life of your carpet by removing abrasive dirt particles that wear down the carpet fibres, causing them to fray and unravel. Through proper cleaning you can delay replacement costs and maintain the appearance and value of your carpets.

The Inconsistent ADHD Mum Cleaning Plan

The best way to keep your house tidy and clean is to do a little bit each day. Makes absolute sense right? But what if that doesn’t work for you? Methods like The Organised Mum are brilliant if you are able to find the time and motivation for daily cleaning, but it’s never caught on in this house for two reasons: my children tend to cause absolute chaos everyday so just to tidy up that days mess uses most of my energy and when it comes to the deep cleaning? The windows? Skirting? Or even cleaning the oven? Well my ADHD brain just doesn’t want to tackle a little bit of those each days. It’s more likely that I will spend an afternoon doing a major focused clean because I’m in rage at the mess. Or maybe I'll have an urgent piece of work that needs to be done so my brain suddenly decides that the shutters need dusting. I recognise the need to try and have a bit more balance and so I'm sharing the best way I've found to motivate me to get the basics done.  This habit tracker gets results and sometimes it even works to magically get housework done without me lifting a finger!

Keeping on top of the housework can feel impossible when you have children