Household Hacks: Laundry, Dishes, Cleaning Up, and Beyond!

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Speaker 1: Hi. This is Laura Vandercamp. I'm a mother of five, an author, journalist, and speaker. And this is Sarah Hart Hunger. I'm a mother of three, a practicing physician and blogger. On the side, we are two working parents who love our careers and our families. Welcome to Best of Both Worlds. Here we talk about how real women manage work, family, and time for fun, from figuring out childcare to mapping out long term career goals. We want you to get the most out of life. Welcome to Best of Both Worlds. This is Laura. This is episode two hundred and forty nine, which is airing in May at some point of twenty twenty two. We're moving a couple of episodes around for various different reasons, but we always try and say a few weeks ahead. So on this now. Today we're going to be talking about household hacks, so various ways that we make our household run more efficiently, smoothly, little things we've come up with for the years. Of course, some folks listening to this might be like, well, we hear that Best of Both Worlds is a big fan of outsourcing, and that is true, correct Sarah, absolutely big fan, big fan. But it turns out that it is almost impossible to outsource everything. No matter how much you do, there is still gonna be other things to do. I mean, even if one has a tremendous amount of money to hire help, there's still going to be a gap between what is there at any given moment and what one theoretically could have and the practical reality. Unless you staff your household like twenty four to seven with various teams of folk, which even most extremely wealthy people are not going to do if they have any aspirations of normality, There's gonna be stuff to be done. I was reminded of this when I read Melinda Gates book not long ago. And I mean she wasn't messing worries about She said, I had a lot of help, you know, raising my kids, running my household all that. I mean, go figure. But she was still talking about like family dinners and they're all cleaning, and like the kids would try to take off, you know, before everything had been cleaned. She's like, no, get back here. We're not leaving until the household, you know, the kitchen is clean. I mean, this is one of the richest families in the world. But you know, unless even if somebody else had cooked the dinner, like unless you have people hovering around until the end of it, like somebody's got to clear the dishes and then you know, put them in the dishwasher or something, and you can leave it until the next morning. But then you know, you've got aunts and your one hundred million dollar households. Its just you want to do something. I wonder if the British Royal family does their dishes over Yeah, well they might. I mean the thing is, if you want to have any sort of privacy whatsoever, like you have to do some things. I mean, it's just like the nature of it. But you know, anyway, we outsource a lot, but we still do a lot. I mean there's still plenty left. There's still plenty to do. I mean, we have, as you do, a full time theame, we have a weekly housekeeping service, we have a yard service. We still wind up doing a ton of stuff, which has always struck me as one of those problems with the broad pronouncement that outsourcing means kids won't learn how to do household tasks, Like if you hire a cleaning service, your kids will never learn to do household task. Like in my experience, there is plenty of work for everyone. Our nanny does a lot of the kid laundry, but I do some on the weekend if there's extra to be done. The kids see me and their dad doing laundry. We all chip in on dishes, on emptying the dishwasher, where we all cook some days, we all run errands at different points, so still a lot to be done. Yes, agree, you know it's so funny since we wrote these notes, I have some additional household hacks because, as I've mentioned, Annabelle has taken to YouTubers that are into making lunches doing house prep, and we spent like two hours binge watching her favorite the family Fudge. If she wants to be on the podcast, I would welcome it because she's definitely made a thriving income. She has her own best of both worlds going right now showing other women how they can keep a perfect home. So it's a little interesting anyway. So many good hacks there, So maybe I'll be adding to this list. Laura, I'll be surprising you are, well, that's exciting. I'm surprised. I will enjoy the surprise as it comes. So first, let's cover that topic of laundry. Do you actually like doing laundry? I know you don't really do a lot of it. Do have you ever enjoyed it? And I used to enjoy laundry pre kids, Yeah, doesn't feel it's never It used to feel meditative because there was like time to do it when I wouldn't be interrupted, And now I never feel like there's a great time to do it. My husband actually doesn't mind doing it because his time to do it is like while watching TV shows late at night when I'm usually asleep. So actually, if ar Nannie doesn't do our laundry, he is more likely to do it than I am at this point. Yeah, and she Now we have a little little talk here about the frequency of laundry, she said she and she does like a load every day? Or how does that work? Yes? And so do we like we found if we? I mean, yes, there's different schools of thought. And actually, as I was watching that YouTube, I was like, well, actually, if you kept your each kid's laundry separate, then you could have like a day for each kid, like Tuesday's genevieven, Wednesday's animal and whatever. So I'll get to we'll get to your hack in a second. But our our practice has just been to jumble everything together. And I find that at least, you know, if our nanny's away, like if it's just me, more than two days worth of laundry just makes me want to like curl up and die because it's just too much to handle. And so we seem to find it more manageable when we just get into the routine of throwing in a load every day, switching in the dryer at some point during the day, and then my husband folding it with TV at night. Repeat. Yeah, I would say we don't do it daily, but I do like the thought of each person individually, because if you look at what takes time with laundry, it is often the separating it out and putting it away. I mean putting something in the machine and starting it and then moving it over. Those are both like one to two minute activities. It is the taking it out and then putting it back where it goes. That is the thing that consumes a lot of time. So one of the easiest ways to reduce that amount of time is to have only one person's stuff in there, because then there is no separating and it can just go straight to that person's place, and if that person is older than say seven years old, that person can put the stuff away, so then it is not the responsibility of whoever is doing the laundry. And so that is one way to save a ton of time right there. I would say, we don't do that, but we only combine two peoples because then that's a balance between needing to do it every day and having seven loads during the week of people's stuff. And it's sort of a bonus points if the two people are like different genders or sizes, so that it is very easy to see whose stuff is who's right, like the the pink underwear is probably not the teenage boys, and so you know, it can be easily separated with less sort of decision making time devoted to it. And is there a laundry spreadsheet like Monday? There is not a long streader Tuesday. So our nanny does the kid's stuff, and she she does like two loads a week, like two runs of it a week basically. But the kids are responsible then for putting their own stuff away, well, not Henry, but the older children can put their own stuff away and take it out. So that's in there's Michael tends to run our stuff together. We have separate hampers, but then he puts it in together, so then it you know, we wind up just pulling it out bit by bit over a day or two. As we think about it, I would say, I'm not sure how much laundry needs to be folded. I'm very curious about your what what is your husband doing when he's folding? We fold everything. I was slightly horrified at your idea that laundry didn't need to be folded, very horrified. Wrinkly. Who's like a small child's clothes is wrinkly? Like what are you buying for them? I don't know. Cotton so like children's T shirts and like leggings or shorts don't really get wrinkly. I don't know. My kids like to have their clothes all condoed, and I find it makes it easier to like, I don't know, I guess. Yeah, your mileage is definitely going to vary. Are you a team Laura or team Sarah on this one? You'll have to let us know, yeah, because I don't think I could ever get behind not folding my kids really clothes or not having them folded. They have a wonderful job. Uh, the younger two are not quite They're getting there, actually, I mean it's kind of our family like expectations. So I'm assuming by the time they're her age they will do their own or maybe they'll choose not to do it. But then, yeah, I can say that a lot of stuff does not wind up getting folded in our house. But sorry, you know, it's not the end of the world. What's your what's your sheets and towels policy? Is there? A? Yeah, the once a week to two weeks, and I am very spoiled and usually either our nanny or our housekeeper do that. So like we don't have like our dedicated housekeeper, we have someone that helps clean every couple weeks and so they often do it that day. Yeah, I would say that I realized with the sheet washing thing that again, taking them off and putting them in the laundry is not challenging. It's the putting them back on that is such a pain in the butt. And but that again, if you are over about eight years old, you could do and you can whine about it a lot, but you can still do it. And so it's sort of a life skill. To put your clean sheets back on your bed. I haven't even mastered the top bunk like skill. I struggle, So I mean I can do it, but it takes me like thirty minutes to get it up there. I totally agree. I totally agree. Yeah, that's one of the reasons we probably wind up doing the sheet washing less frequently. Then perhaps one should one other. Just two our hacks here. If you have a baby, we just wash everyone's stuff in the baby detergent. So we just buy a huge thing of draft. And actually Henry has pretty sensitive skin, various things going on there, so we are just washing everyone's stuff in draft, probably for the rest of all time. Well, I mean we have a big thing of tide too, and so if it's obvious his stuff isn't in it, somebody might use the tide, but most of the kid's stuff winds up in the draft. And just in case you think this is a drift commercial, I've actually never used dreft really, they've always just used the all free and clear and it's never caused any rashes, so that's good. It's been good. Good to not have rashes. If you can avoid rashes. We washed everything on cold I mean, unless there's been a reason that it needs to be sanitized. But if it's not cold, there's obviously no need to separate the colors because they don't bleed then, So I really don't know why we'd ever do anything else. Generally, just don't buy clothes that require special washing instructions. I mean, that's a big thing. Like children's clothes that would require special washing instructions is just like a horrible idea. The one exception is adult clothes like women's dress pants that can be machine washed but not dried. This is still generally better than the dry cleaning that would be needed, So I make an exception for that. That that's that is an allowable hack. There certainly some things like mm will floor pants are our machine way. They're worth it, They're worth the effort, worth the effort to avoid going to the dry cleaner. Should we take our quick take our hat will be back next household area more household hacks. Well, we are back talking at household hacks. We are finding out the differences in how we approach our philosophies of laundry. I have apparently the non folder, Sarah is the folder. So let's go to dishes. There may be ways schools of thought on dishes and dishwasher loading and emptying. I don't know that I really follow all of the details on that. Have you timed yourself emptying the dishwasher, Yes, it's like eight minutes, five to eight minutes for me, five to eight minutes. Yeah, it doesn't take much time. Yeah, it is incredibly quick, which is funny because it's one of those tasks that in my brain would expand mentally because I don't enjoy it. I mean, I'm not sure anyone does, but I particularly don't. And so I was like, you know, it's like fifteen minutes, twenty minutes, half an hour. I don't know spend my life emptying the dishwasher. And eight minutes is like drying stuff off too that like didn't get completely dry because sometimes the plastic stuff doesn't really. Yeah, I don't know, at least not in our dishwasher. We have a bosh. Yeah, I don't think it has like a hot cycle anyway. So yeah, I always find it's like, don't procrastinate, just do it. Having an empty dishwasher is always worth it. We definitely are of the unlike the laundry, I don't care how anything goes in there, like whatever that. You know. Some people are like picky about how you load your dishwasher, and I'm like, just fit as much stuff as you can'tit there, and I'm just great for my dishwasher because it is an amazing tool, isn't it. It's an amazing tool. Yeah. We try to get in a rhythm where we run it at night, so it runs sort of overnight because it's like, i mean, modern dishwashers take like almost three hours. It's kind of ridiculous. I don't you know. I'm sure there's some energy saving reason for that, but anyway, so run it at night. It's clean in the morning. It can be put away in the morning. We do try to sort of stack it so that the bigger plates are in the back, the littler ones are in the front. I mean, there's a there's sort of a method to it. Obviously, you have to teach kids like put your bowls upside down. Wonder why it suddenly looks like a fish bowl. It's right side up, but it definitely is, you know, And weekends it goes faster, right because everyone's eating all their meals here, So sometimes it gets run in the middle of the day then too, and so then the kids need to empty it. That needs to get into the rhythm of that. So I'm curious for your hand wash stuff, though, what's your approach? What do you have to wash hand wash dishes? I see you use something else, but I just use one of those sponges that's like rough on one side and smoother on the other side. And whatever dish soap was on sale. Yes, okay, So we tend to do the brush, the scrub brush and like a squirt dishwasher detergent, because it seems to be the easiest way to be able to do one dish at a time, And if there is only one dish, you would like the person who created that one dish to go ahead and do it, as opposed to leaving it there in case some magical dish fairy comes along and would like to do all the dishes at once. The magical dish fairy does not want to do all the dishes at once. The magical dish fairy would like everyone to do their dish once they have done it, and then you know, put it away. For instance, once popcorn bowl one, you should squirt scru up rents put it away, and by the way, we put almost every not everything, but we put a lot in a dishwasher. Yeah, like we are well that scrubrush can then be dishwashed. Oh amazing, amazing every couple of runs. You you stick it in right, and then you know it's clean for the next one. I assume most other things could be too, I think like sponges. Yeah, like even like the parts of your food processor can go in the dishwasher. Like we put knives into a dishwasher. I'm sure that's not like what you would do if you were a chef and had very high end knives. But I'm always like, yeah, they've lasted many many years and I didn't have to hand wash them for many many years. Now we put our knives in the dishwasher too. It's funny because I read some I was probably in real simple They're like hand washing your knives is just it's a small investment of time that keeps them, you know, good for whatever. I'm like, actually, I'm not sure that actually that comes out that you know, you work an extra hour or two and buy a new set of knives, versus you know, the time extra time it would have taken you to handwash them for years. You know, I'm not sure everyone thinks that. I mean, I haven't had to buy knives anyway. Like I have decade old knives that are going strong I don't know, bones or something and grinding them down. I don't think they get that dull that quick. And again, most of us are not working at French laundry and need you know, the best knives in the world, so something that could also be dish washed. I would also say that prevention is good here, that there's nothing I don't know. Sometimes people get excited in the kitchen and make every single pot dirty. Yeah, I mean that is why probably decoupling cooking and cleaning up isn't always the best idea. But actually, in our house usually it's not decoupled. So it's fine. If I'm cooking, I'm highly motivated. It's like me or like two pot meals or something. But you know, the fewer pots the better because then you you don't have to scrub out more than you need to. So that's the dishes cleaning up. Sarah, you are in the midst of a big decluttering. Oh, we went to town this weekend. I mean it was like, I'm so slightly annoyed that, like I couldn't muster the energy to do that much decluttering until we're moving, because I'm like, well, no, the house is so nice, I can enjoy it, and we're like moving on three days. So I don't know, I don't know what that says. I just feel like it is so much easier to pick up and like exist in your house when you were not buried in random stuff, whether they be the kind of stuff Laura likes to keep, like your kid's artwork, or I don't know, I just looking around. I can't possibly claim to be a minimalist, but like, I guess I want to be one, So we're getting there. No, if you ever have to get yourself in the mindset to declutter, you can always pretend you're gonna move, and then maybe that would light a fire well more more practically, schedule a pickup from Green Drop or one of those like that that they then give it to the places that run thrift stores, like you know, American Red Cross or Purple Heart or whatever. But they will, you know, let you schedule online for a certain day for a pickup, and so say you schedule it like two weeks out for Friday two weeks out, and then you're like, hey, now I have to get stuff out there because I promise ten boxes. So that's one thing that you can force a deadline. I might do that. I might put it on like monthly rotation, and I could do it in conjunction. I don't know if your area has this, but ours has like a monthly bulk pickup where you could put true trash items that are like an old mattress or something by the side of the road and it'll get picked up for free. It's once a month. So if I were to make that like our decluttering day and also schedule a donation day, that day could be like you get rid of your trash, you get rid of your donatables all in one day. Help others have a decluttered house. Yeah. Yeah, But even if you don't have a free bulk pickup, which I don't think we do around here, there are a lot of junk calling services, so you know, you might just avail yourself of this, say like twice a year. You are going to pay you know, it's not a huge amount. I mean, it's you obviously pay something to have a truck come to your house and have a team of guys get your stuff in the truck. But you know, it's it's a pretty competitive business. So you know, there's probably three or four operators in your area, so you can just call and get a quote. But if you've got in the habit of scheduling that every year every six months, that could be a way to get rid of, you know, true trash in your house as well the things that are not donatable and again public service announcement. When you're donating stuff, it needs to be stuff that the nonprofit can sell, not something that you know would be the piece of clothing keeping someone from frostbite and nakedness. Like that's generally not what's going on. It's that they sell it and use the money for their programs. So it has to be sellable to people who would pay money for it for it to be a donation. Like think to yourself, okay, minimal quality for a thrift store, would it be on the shelf? Yes, yeah, that makes sense. So yeah, that's something you can do to declutter. You know, if you do a you know, family cleanup is always a good idea to get everyone involved because it also can limit the time like, in order to get everyone doing it, you have to designate a time, and then it generally needs to be relatively short and contained. And so if everyone's focused on, say picking up for twenty minutes, you set a timer, it's kind of easier to get people to do that versus nagging every you know, five hours for like a week, like have you picked up yet? Have you picked up yet? And also then it allows people to relax as well because they know they're not going to be told to clean at some other point and you don't have to either, like that's the cleanup time, and if it doesn't happen, then then it's fine. You know. An obvious time is if you have somebody coming into vacuum the next day, that would be a good time to pick up stuff before they come. On weekends, they take advantage of my highly motivated children when it's about to be screen time. So I'm like, okay, if you want to start your screen time on time, your toys have to be picked up up And all of a sudden, it's like you had I don't know, little motor and everything's picked up in six minutes, and it's like amazing, what a team of three highly motivated children can clean up in six minutes. Yeah. So one hack we have for you know, if people are doing a cleaning service, or if you are cleaning on your own this could possibly work too, is to split the house but have the busiest rooms get the cleaning each time. So our cleaning service does, you know, like the first floor and the kitchen one week and then the next week do the second floor, but also the kitchen because in the second floors where the bedrooms and bathrooms all are, and that way they don't have to you know, the whole house does not need to be cleaned every week to that standard, and then it would just be you know, time consuming and more expensive because we'd be paying for all those hours. But the kitchen probably does need that cleaning. So that's some way to get a weekly cleaning service of the dirty place without having to you know, take the cost and time of cleaning service for the rest of it. And obviously if you're doing it on your own, you can do the same thing like you know, I clean on Fridays for instance, and you know I do the kitchen and the you know, common areas on the first floor or you know common areas that aren't bedrooms on this day and then the next week do bedrooms and kitchen or whatever like that. I find that nothing gets that bad until after two weeks. Yeah, like you could. You could also hire them for every two weeks and then do your own like ten minute interval, just like empty trash bands like quickly, you know, and it's like kind of not I don't know, Well, your again your mileagimary variants. Some people may be like, no, my house must be cleaned from weekly, but I notice when it's more than two weeks. I don't notice when it's like ten days versus I would say that day or in your standards, it is one of the best household hacks around that probably nobody else is noticing quite as much of this as you are. I mean, you can wipe up any sort of obvious dirt and a you know if you see it. But yeah, if anything that's not a massive source of hygiene problems can probably go a little bit longer, and then you might buy yourself a fair amount of time with that one thing for cleaning up having bins for random stuff. And I know some of the organization people hate this idea. I keep reading stuff about like the junk drawer is the enemy of humanity or whatever, because then you aren't organizing it, you're just putting it there. But I found that if you have bins to stash stuff like a room can get picked up and look presentable a lot faster. And especially if you don't let the bins go forever, like you do put them away at some point, then it can make the cleaning process far faster. Even for organizing having a junk drawer is I call this the paradox of the junk draw But if you have one category for other, like any sort of categorization product project, if you have an other category, you can organize everything else far faster because if there's not an obvious category, then it goes in other. But the fact that you're allowing for obvious categories meaning means it's a quicker process. So I would just throw that out there as a way to make any sort of organization sorting cleaning go faster is having one bin for other slash everything slash a junk drawer, however you want to categorize it. Also put a trash can in the family car. I was gonna say, don't leave that one out. That's so true. I don't do that, and I should, and I when I feel like my life just feels incredibly chaotic, usually one of the things I feel moved to do is to get an empty, empty like grocery garbage bag and get all the trash out of my car and I feel a million times better. So I don't know why I don't just keep one in there, but yeah, yeah, either way, especially if you have kids are using the car, it's just they're going to have trash and they're just gonna throw it on the ground, So having somewhere for them to put it is a great idea. All right, let's go to Errands. Yes, we are subscribed and savers, much to my husband's dismay because he is not a fan of a certain company Amazon, but I am sometimes so I really like subscribe and save just because there is a discount. You don't have to think about it. We'll never run out of paper towels because it's a trigger every month for me to see if we need it or not. The only thing is we have like ten or twelve subscriptions, but I don't need all ten or twelve every month. And if you forget to tell them not to send it you're in trouble, so they do send you an email, but like, I don't know, I feel like they've probably researched when do we send this email? So it gets buried under everything so they don't two winds up buying ten tubes or two. So I put in my planner like around the twenty seventh of every because it's usually like a certain day you have to respond by twenty fifth, twenty seventh whatever, Like put it in there and like remind yourself or set an alarm on your phone or whatever to be like tell a subscribe and save not to send me everything on my list. At least I need that reminder. But I do find the overall concept helpful. I will say I went to Costco, and I noticed that some of their prices are way better, So maybe someday I'll switch. Yeah, we get our toilet paper and paper towels from Costco, but that is reliant on one party not minding going to Costco. And my husband seems to like it, so that's fine. He can buy stuff there. We order a lot of one off stuff from Amazon and similar type places. One of my Friday batch, the little things I'll put on my Friday punch list. So these are little things that I don't want distracting me the rest of the week. Is ordering any household items that we might need or also, you know, it's not that hard to just do it, especially if you have Amazon Prime. The minute you notice something is gone, you have your phone, pull up the app, you order it. I mean, you can overthink these things. I'm sure that's not the most efficient from a delivery perspective, but we're often ordering enough stuff anyway that it tends to come two to three times a week the Amazon truck here, so it's that is what it is. We also are Kid's Karate studio is right by Target. So if we do need to get something in the middle of the week, be that a grocery item or household item, and it has not been procured during a big shop or during you know, ordering or whatever, it's pretty easy to go there and get it. And that's something that an adult can easily do and sometimes maybe even wants to do during the class versus I don't know, walking out outside, sitting in the car, half watching, half watching the phone, whatever it is. So I would say look into kid activity times. As you know, a good time to do a quick grocery shop. You can get a lot done in forty five minutes to an hour, and then you wouldn't need to use other time. So it could be definitely better than going on the weekend, if that is at all possible. Yeah, I like that. So in terms of meal planning and cooking, what are you meal plans? So what are you doing? Yeah? We do, we still. I mean, it's just part of my weekend routine. I get my menu planning pad out. I use either most of the time, I use Preptish, which are like pre selected, you know, they give you a recipe list and an ingredient list, or if I'm like wanting to get a kid involved, whip out one of our favorite cookbooks. But I basically plan at least formuls with leftovers and make my grocery list right then and there. I honestly can't wrap my head around how a family could function without meal planning, although I know some do and they don't die they tend that stuff. Well, we just I mean, how we sort of do this is have theme nights. So Wednesday is it's like a plan? Yeah, I mean, so it's a recurring plan it's not a new plan. Every week Wednesday is breakfast for dinner. Fridays make your own pizza night. I'm currently still doing the Sunbasket kits twice a week. We may rethink that I think We've gone through a lot of their stuff now and so I'm getting a little a little tired of it. But comes two nights a week, so that's basically fills the week because then we only need to think of Thursday during the week, and that's often you know, people might be in and out anyways. The kids can just have like grilled cheese, or we have fijitas or pasta or something like that. And weekends as well, you know, there's often some you know, you might be gone somewhere, or we often do a steak or other such big protein one night and then can use that as leftovers for lunches during the week. But we just got a new grill, so that's exciting. So it's a gas grill. We always had charcoal before, which it's kind of like building a fire in a fireplace. It takes a long time, like you have to you know, be invested in the process to do a charcoal grill. Some people think they taste better, which is fine. But the gas grill is like again turning on the gas fireplace. It goes very fast and then you can just put your meat on it. So we may start doing that from more weeknight type things, whereas the charcoal was weakened only kind of activity and not a busy weekend day activity. And then for breakfast because the kids, the kids will get to lunches in a minute. But I'm curious about your breakfast rotation concept. No, we don't actually do it. That's only my fantasy kitchen. But I really think. I think this is like I have a friend who used to do it and it worked really well for her, and she was, okay, here's what was good about it. It got her kids to eat like a few things. She didn't have to think about it. She just offered the one thing and it was just like it was just like her routine. So she had like oatmeal one day, muffins one day, eggs one day, yogurt bowl one day whatever. Whatever. Her things were. My struggle. And I know you're like, I don't have to ask them, but here's what happens every morning with my children. They calm downstairs, they're in moods. They never wake up happy. They're like fighting over the couch and I'm like, what would you guys like for breakfast? Silence? What would you like for breakfast? Silent? We're gonna be late. I need to make you breakfast. No response. Okay, fine, I'm making you cereial. No, I don't love that. Like I mean, some kids, that's a slight exaggeration, and some kids are better than others. But if I just plunk something down on their seat, it can just be completely rejected, and then they refuse to eat anything, and then they're whining that they're hungry. And it's like, it really is better if there's buy in to what I'm serving, but I often it's such such a one. Thing I tried that I maybe could go back to is having them pick the night before, tell me the night before when you're in a better mood. In that way, I'll have it ready for you in the morning. But yeah, I obviously haven't figured this out. We keep things very easy, but I just wish I could just it's not the making of the breakfast, it's getting them to commit to the breakfast. So if you have tips for me, let me know. Yeah, And anyone can, you know, tell their breakfast strategies here, So the good or bad thing, I don't know how it is, but like we're not doing all three at once ever, like I have all five at once. Ever, it's in a long series over multiple hours, so it's one kid at a time basically, And so Jasper, you know, we just do a waffle and fruit or this morning was hard boiled eggs and fruit because we're recording this right after Easter, so we have like literally fifty hard boiled eggs in the house right now that need to get eaten. So, you know, lots of hard boiled eggs this morning for breakfast. But I would say it's always just two components, so think muff and pressed fruit, baffle plus fruit, egg plus fruit, cereal plus fruit, and that's that's your choices more or less. If you want to get your own thing, you can. Ruth will often get her own breakfast and do whatever it is. But for the older two boys at least, it's a very time constricted thing to give them as most sleep as possible and get them out the door for their early starting schools. So there's just not really any discussion about it. It's food is put in front of them, they eat it and go about their day. Hi, I get it. I don't know why such a struggle. Maybe it has to do with them sort of just rebuilding against that time condensed period that we have, because it's kind of like they wake up and I'm like, you're on the clock. We got to leave in thirty minutes or whatever, and it is all three once. But well, if I figured out, I'll let you know on a future episode. I had some fantasies of doing more like homemade muffins, like we would do muffins on the weekend. I mean, there's a couple problems here. One is that doing muffins only makes twelve, which you get through them that night with seven people I have. You know, we don't even have seven people, but we have the same Yeah, so the most it could ever cover is Monday morning. And you know, for I guess four children, it could cover Monday morning. But that's it. And so yeah, well we'll see. It's there's nothing wrong with waffle. If I made muffins, my kids would probably actually eat that happily. But I don't usually actually do that. Yeah. Yeah, let's talk about lunches though, So what's your approach for lunches? Well, lately, okay, so our nanny has made the kids lunches for the most part. I always have to do Monday's lunch because she's not there in time. Sometimes we take the kids to school. But lately Annabelle has been super into making lunches thanks to that YouTube channel, and I am very happy about it. So she often makes all three kids lunches. She actually kind of has fun doing it. I bought her. I knew they now have two options for which lunch box they want to use, because she likes to use these bent go boxes because that's what the YouTuber was using. But you know what worth it if she's gonna be I was like, wow, you've used YouTube for good here. And by the way, I would happily at this stage have my kids purchase lunch. But our school does not offer lunch for purchase, so that is why we are homemade. We do. Actually, they provide pizza on Friday if you pay for it, so we've been doing that. So now it's four days. Well yeah, and our family, everyone either buys lunch or makes their own, except Alex, our seven year old, which I've sort of made my piece with this. My goal was that everyone would just buy their lunch at school eat what they offer. It seems reasonable to me. I look at what the menu is, I've seen it looks like a normal, reasonably healthy lunch. But he won't eat it. So I pack the same thing roughly for him every day. It's it's pretty much modular, and so it's it's literally a two minute process. I can do it in the morning. Well, you know, if I'm drinking old coffee, I'm eating it up in the microwave or something. It's so I just, you know, I put the ice pack in his lunch box. I grab a squeeze apple sauce, some raisins or crasins or dried blueberries or whatever the fruit is that they we're doing, cheese stick or a similar type cheese product, you know, package cheese product, a some sort of snack like pretzels, and then a bread product. It's been like raisin bread or cinnamon bread or a bun or whatever it is. But that he will eat all of those things, and so he has a lunch. Ruth has me go because I have to pre order roots lunch for whatever reason. The middle in high school, I don't have to do this, but the elementary school you have to put in a pre order for it. It's still free. Apparently that's going to be changing. I don't know, but it's still free at the moment. But she wants to look at the menu and choose which days she orders, and then the days she doesn't like it, she will make her own lunch, which I actually have zero clue what she puts in there. At one point we had to learn that you don't put bananas in the fridge if you are making your lunch the night before. But you know, life skills, learning new things all the time. I agree, I don't have a lot of it. I feel like our kitchen is stocked with relatively healthy things, so how bad could it be what Annabel puts together? And it seems fun. Yeah, just for family meals. One other hack that you know people who have larger families might want to do. We assemble everything on the counter, so I put out like seven plates and have you know, cut up fruit on everyone's plate or the veggies on everyone's plate, and dished it out and then people grab their own plate and grab whatever silverware they feel they will need, and whatever drink they feel they will need. Obviously not Henry, but everyone else can can do this on their own. And the upside of this is that you're not getting a whole lot of unused silverware. It's you know that somebody for whatever reason doesn't use a spoon, they use a fork on some item, or they don't really need the knife for it, Whereas if you're setting the table ahead of time, you wind up with some unused utensils, or somebody wasn't really thirsty, and then you know they had the drink that they didn't drink, and you know, it's just more stuff. So that's that's something that I've found is a time saver. There, no that makes sense. We I mean, as I've spoken, we don't have family dinner every night. Maybe hopefully in the future at least I can eat with the kids some more. But we do have the kid set the table when we do eat together, so at least that's generally they do it. I don't do it, and they're trained pretty well after dinner to bring their plate to the sink. We don't have that many household tasks other than cleaning up their toys, which can be a lot of work because they make a giant mess, or Genevie makes a giant mess, and all three of them are cleaning up. Oh, this is very off topic from this topic. But my latest kid chore that they're really good at doing is shredding paper. We pay them two dollars a bag. They can either get paid individually or they can do it together and split the two dollars. Sounds worth it to get that done. It's great. It's an excellent service exactly. Yeah, where you're supposed to bring your plate up and put it, you know, rinse it off, put it in the dishwasher, So somebody's always trying to get out of it. I don't know. It just strikes it as like why, like why would you try? Really busy mom, I have a lot of homework, so I can't bring my clean to well. It's not even expressed. It's not like, oh I'm too busy, I can't do it. It's just like somebody will try to like get up and walk away. I'm like, do you think I don't see it? That's so funny, But people have to do that. Help with the dishes, if asked, clean up the room, plus common areas taking out trash, as a family. This is a Wednesday night activity that people can carry stuff because we have a very long driveway now, so we have to bring those trash cans down and bring them back up. So if there's it's like a little wall, a little wall built in, everyone can can do it. Walk the dog when asked, watch your little brother when asked as well. So those are all the various tasks that are on the table for us. Awesome. And then finally the last thing kids stuff. You put shoes in a crate. Well, I don't know, we may be changing it because we have a little mini mudroom closet situation in our new house, but we had an interesting setup we in our regular closet. You opened the door and we had like shoved one of those ikea you know, I love those little cube things. So we have a cube for each kid's shoes, although really the two bottom cubes are like all the kid's shoes and the top cubes are like all of Josh and my shoes, and one of the ones on the top is Genevieve. So we were not like fastidious and like keep them all separate or anything, but it's worked pretty well to corral everything and my other kind of like mudroom slash closet hack is to not let the backpacks fester for weeks because the stuff I find in there, it's like an old towel, an old piece of lunch, like it just gets so disgusting. I don't know that I get to them weekly, but I think a lot of times I do, at least Genevieve's because I have to take out her like we have to wash their rug for school. Don't even ask, but yeah, Annabel's and Camera doesn't use a backpack, so that helps. Yeah. I don't know how he gets away with that, but he sounds like a great idea. Yeah, once a week to run through them or have the kids run through them would be a great thing to do. All right, Well, let's give to the question section here. So this is from longtime lurker, first time email or this person calls herself. She says, I'm considering moving from primarily daycare to more of a dual situation. So I guess maybe you know, preschool plus part time nanny or something. I know you've spoken before about your screening process, but I don't know that i've heard you talk about the actual I intervirite you questions you have used? Do you ask for references? I feel like the interview questions are softballs. I mean, how do you really get a feel for the person who's going to spend so much time with your kids? My disclaimer is it, Laura, You'll be much better at answering this because we've had the same nanny for almost nine years now, so I haven't done this very often, and I'm grateful for that because it's it's it is stressful. But I think the references are far and away the most important thing. That is how we knew that we really wanted our nanny to work for us speaking to the people she had worked with before finding out, like their candid thoughts about what they thought about things, you know, what was good, if there was anything they would change. I remember like the tone of the says it all like they were just like, oh, don't let this one go, Like she's so great. We wish we could have kept having her. And yes, finding out like why did it end? Did the kids just age out of it? Or was it a you know, our I think ours They said something like we our financial situation changed and we just couldn't afford it anymore. So I believed it, and you know that meant okay, it was nothing that our nanny did, and so yeah, obviously those references were true. I think I spoke to two actually, and they were very consistent, and that was really really helpful in terms of questions. I think I remember asking like how, like walk me through how you would spend a day. But remember I was interviewing for nanny for like a sixteen month old and an unborn child, so the questions I would probably ask today would be very different. And I think we did ask for some kind of proof of like driving record, because we knew that she would be driving our kids around. We want to make sure like she was a safe driver. Yeah she was. I think definitely the references are most important because you can tell if you're calling multiple references and they're like this person's awesome, like you know, most likely you're going to be similar. You know, tell me how you'd structure So for questions for the person themselves, I mean, like you said, tell me how you structure a day with them. You could give them a scenario, see how they answer, ask them about their past childcare experiences, like talk about that job, you know, what did you like about that job, like what worked really well there? You know, what do you think you know have been different? You can ask if they've dealt with an emergency situation how it went. You could give an example of a scenario that you have dealt with recently and asked for you know, their advice and how they would have handled it. You know, so that I think all of those are good way because you're just trying to get a sense from of what kind of person you know they are they thinking about problems solving? Do they seem creative, do they seem positive? Those are all the kind of things that you are looking to figure out. And yeah, I would I would say it's like you want to have a good rapport with the person, think that they are smart and patient and optimistic and trustworthy and all that. But then the references are the ones who are going to tell you exactly what it's going to be like as an employer employee sort of relationship. And that's what you know, you really want to get clear on because you know what your deal breakers are, right Like, if I mean hopefully you do, may you may not. That's the other problem is you do gain experience with this over time, and so maybe the first person you don't actually know that it would drive you crazy if they did X, Y or Z because you haven't done this before. But after the first person, you do know it will drive you crazy if they do X, Y and Z, and hopefully you can have a good you know, if the person is otherwise great, you could have a discussion about this and solve that problem together. But then you know, going into the next hiring process that maybe that's something that you wouldn't you know, want to compromise on. All right, Sarah Love of the Week. I mean, I guess we've been doing a lot of sort of our household hacks are all loves of the week. I will have to give a shout out to the family Fudge on YouTube because Annabel found them. But they're very entertaining. They have a lot of great household hacks if you're interested in that. They have four delightful children, and I have to say, good job Annabel. She just founded that. Yeah, I'm very curious how she found that. We got to work on our search process on YouTube because I feel like we wind up in you know, worst places. Although YouTube Kids is pretty good, but I like some of their drawing. The drawing videos, like you said, the magic whatever it is, I don't know, but they color in and you can see the things taking shape. It's always fun the Internet. It's a wonderful and amazing place. Anyway, we've been talking all things household hacks this week. We will be back next week with more on making work and life fit together. Thanks for listening. You can find me Sarah at the shoebox dot com or at the Underscore Shoebox on Instagram, and you can find me Laura at Laura vandercam dot com. This has been the best of both worlds podcasts. Please join us next time for more on making work and life work together.