Your Laziest Mom Hacks
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What are your laziest/smartest mom hacks? What are your best tips for getting stuff done around the house in “unperfect” ways?
Some readers seemed miffed by my posts on photo organization and organizing kids’ clothes — but I am faaaar from perfect, and hate to give that impression. (Sorry, ladies!) Of course I’m going to write a post about the things that I feel like I’ve figured out, while skipping posts about the piles of laundry around my house (and lo, there are many). So I thought we’d do a post about some of our laziest mom hacks — what are your imperfect systems for Getting Stuff Done? Of course, some of these “lazy” things below are also some of the smartest things I’ve done. It’s like folding underwear (which I haven’t done in a LOOONG time, well before kids). Once you stop, you’re never going back.
For my $.02, these are 9 of my lazy mom hacks:
- We have the same 10 dinners on repeat — and even those are pretty lazy dinners! I have a little board where I write what we’re having for the next week and make sure we have those supplies on hand. Fooey on new recipes and experimentation — that’s what ordering Seamless is for, right? (Which is what happens when I don’t have the week planned out.)
- I “sort” the laundry by throwing it into different drawers. My boys are a wrinkled mess, and I toootally don’t care. (Similar to this video, I suppose.) (Update: check out our whole discussion on how working parents handle laundry!)
- We now put a lingerie bag on the top rack of the dishwasher filled with straws, pacifiers, Take and Toss tops, bottle nipples, et cetera, and see how they come out. Some we redo by hand, but a lot are fine.
- I’ve kept my baby in footed pajamas for most of his first year. He only wears separate pants/shirt outfits when we’re going to a party or some other event.
- I’ve adopted a “one touch rule” for picking stuff up around the house — it’s probably slower than making bins or something like that but at least some stuff gets put away. The rule: if I pick up something once I have to put it back where it rightfully belongs, not move it to another place.
- I’ve talked before about how my new mom makeup changed after I had J, but I recently changed my makeup routine again based on the “one touch” rule — when I use eyeliner it’s liquid eyeliner (one touch) versus pencil eyeliner (which looks better, but requires me to draw the line with the pencil, put down the pencil and pick up the smudgy brush, open a pot of eyeshadow to dip the smudgy brush into it, and then use the smudgy brush); I’ve also stopped curling my eyelashes on most days and just swipe on mascara.
- We only use three main credit cards (I haaaate store cards) and I have those three set up to automatically pay the minimum. (We almost always pay them off in full every month, but I set up the automatic payment after I forgot once.)
- I studied a few categories of big expenses (dentist bills, children’s classes, home/term/personal articles insurance), figured out what the yearly total was, amortized the expenses to a monthly number, and set up an automatic transfer to various Ally accounts for those big expenses.
- I plan to outsource vacation planning to my son once he’s old enough.
Ladies, what are your laziest (or smartest) mom hacks?
Pictured: Laundry delivery! Personal photo from Xmas 2012 (at my parents’ house). All rights reserved.
Sales of note for 9.10.24
(See all of the latest workwear sales at Corporette!)
- Ann Taylor – 30% off your purchase
- Banana Republic Factory – Up to 50% off everything + extra 20% off
- Boden – 15% off new styles
- Eloquii – $29 and up select styles; up to 50% off everything else
- J.Crew – Up to 50% off wear-to-work styles; extra 30% off sale styles
- J.Crew Factory – 40-60% off everything; extra 60% off clearance
- Lands’ End – 30% off full-price styles
- Loft – Extra 40% off sale styles
- Talbots – BOGO 50% everything, includes markdowns
- Target – Car-seat trade-in event through 9/28 — bring in an old car seat to get a 20% discount on other baby/toddler stuff.
- Zappos – 26,000+ women’s sale items! (check out these reader-favorite workwear brands on sale, and some of our favorite kids’ shoe brands on sale)
Kid/Family Sales
- Carter’s – Birthday sale, 40-50% off & extra 20% off select styles
- Hanna Andersson – Up to 50% off all baby; up to 40% off all Halloween
- J.Crew Crewcuts – Extra 30% off sale styles
- Old Navy – 40% off everything
- Target – BOGO 25% off select haircare, up to 25% off floor care items; up to 30% off indoor furniture up to 20% off TVs
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And — here are some of our latest threadjacks of interest – working mom questions asked by the commenters!
- The concept of “backup care” is so stupid…
- I need tips on managing employees in BigLaw who have to leave for daycare pickup…
- I’m thinking of leaning out to spend more time with my family – how can I find the perfect job for that?
- I’m now a SAHM and my husband needs to step up…
- How can I change my thinking to better recognize some of my husband’s contributions as important, like organizing the shed?
- What are your tips to having a good weekend with kids, especially with little kids? Do you have a set routine or plan?
Laundry: Each person in my house has their own laundry hamper (dirty clothes) and basket (clean clothes). Each person has a laundry day. The clean clothes go to the right room and can be folded/put away over the next week. The laundry basket doesn’t have to be empty until a week later. It also saves me from sorting the baby vs. preschooler clothes (impossible) and the me vs. my husband clothes (easy but still annoying).
That’s about it! Looking forward to hearing what other people say.
We wash the small bottle parts by soaking them in a large mixing bowl with dish soap on our kitchen counter. We rinse them under the faucet and put them straight into the microwave sterilizer, then onto a bottle drying rack. We wash the bottles in the dishwasher on the “Sanitize” setting.
Another hack is to leave things at the bottom of the stairs to go up, so if you are going upstairs you take with you what you can carry. We didn’t invent this one, but it has come in very handy since our 6 month old was born.
I feel like I have ideas to contribute to this post, but I’d really prefer language other than “Lazy Mom” since I don’t associate with that idea at all. I think phrases like that encourage mom-guilt, which is unnecessary and unproductive. I’m not ashamed (nay – I’m thrilled!) to find quicker, more efficient ways to do things.
1. We have a two hamper system in my master bedroom. Hamper 1 is all underwear, PJs, workout clothes, etc. Basically the kinds of clothes that cannot be messed up in the wash and can sit unattended in the dryer. My husband knows to do the laundry in this hamper whenever it piles up. Hamper 2 has all my work clothes and bras, plus any clothes of my husband’s that require attention while laundering. I wash this hamper on the weekends.
2. I buy whatever veggies I can find in steamer bags, nuke ’em in the microwave, and then puree for the baby. Based on recs here, I freeze them in these ice cube trays (http://www.amazon.com/OXO-Good-Grips-Cube-Tray/dp/B00004OCLA) and then sort them into two bags in the freezer: green and colored. Each baby meal consists of equal parts green cubes and colored cubes. I refill the freezer bags with a big batch of each every 10 days or so.
3. I also am only dressing the baby in footed sleepers. I am dismayed to learn that the options vastly run out after size 9m! Does anyone else have a source for size 12m+?
Kat, fwiw, your photo post made me realize I need to do SOMETHING to back up my phone photos at the very least – and now both Google and Amazon have phone apps that will back your phone photos when the apps are open. Not organized, but at least not lost if I lose my phone (and it doesn’t require me to be married to iCloud storage).
My boys are only a size apart in clothes (18 months difference) and over time, we have gradually just combined all their clothes into one, big, wardrobe. It means that some days my older son is wearing a shirt a little too tight or others my little one is wearing a big, baggy shirt (today he’s wearing a too big shirt that says “Suns Out, Guns Out”…shame….), but I’m ok with that.
We keep little Rubbermaid containers in our living room filled with clean socks and underwear. We always get the boys dressed in that room, and it didn’t make sense to keep those essentials somewhere else.
We also recycle probably the same 10 dinners over and over. I’ll throw in a new one every now and then, but we have a pretty good routine going.
My boys eat peanut butter toast and fruit for dinner more often than I care to admit. It’s easy and we always have the ingredients on hand.
not exactly a hack, but we have given up and hired someone to come to our house three times a week. in addition to regular cleaning, she does the laundry and puts it away and does the dishes. we stopped doing dishes and for the most part let them pile up on in between days. it’s expensive and we could definitely use the money for other things, but it enables us to spend a lot more time with LO and on our work.
My best hack is expensive, but worth it: I buy many multiples of things we use every day, like pump parts, bottles, sippy cups, sleep sacks, crib sheets, etc. That way I can go a couple of days without running the dishwasher or doing laundry, and even if she pees on everything a couple of days in a row, I’m not scrambling to find bedding.
We don’t fold laundry. We sort into 1 pile for each person on the guestroom floor, then everyone grabs what they need during the week.
Totally agree with Famouscait’s dislike of the term “lazy”– considering working mothers are expected to do far more than SAHMs did a generation ago, I don’t think any of us are lazy. For me, I try to have an overall attitude of not getting overly wound up about having things “just so” more than any one tip or trick. That said, these are my tips and tricks.
1. Not researching things to death– What’s the highest rated [whatever] on amazon? Buy. This daycare seems good? Sign up. There are 900 types of baby food? Just pick some and throw it in the cart. Reminding myself that its all good.
2. My daughter doesn’t have a bath every day. My pediatrician said to bathe her once a week in the winter unless there was a blowout or something of the sort, and twice a week in the summer. This is going to change once she gets older, I’m sure, but for now bathing is not an everyday thing.
3. Other than our silverware, we do not own any dishes, pot, pans, baking items, etc., that can’t go through the dishwasher. We also run bottles and bottle parts through the dishwasher, and only sanitize stuff we’ve just bought.
4. Have formula and diaper delivery subscription through amazon.
5. All bills on auto pay.
6. All laundry gets washed and dried together without being sorted in any way. The only things I hang dry are my bras. I do fold the baby clothes, but it goes in two plastic bins under the crib- one for pjs, one for day clothes.
7. Low holiday and birthday expectations. I think I got my daughter 2 board books for her first Christmas, and that was only because *I* was tired of the ones we had. I don’t know if we’ll have a 1st b-day party beyond having a couple of people over and eating cake from a box mix. These little kid “pinterest-worthy” parties I see make me feel like I’m going to break out in hives, and I plan to avoid that kind of thing until my kid complains.
We never found a storage spot for bottles and all their pieces, so I just started throwing them in a big bowl on the counter. Now that’s where the sippy cup parts and kid utensils live. The come out of the dishwasher basket, and get dumped right in the bowl. Since this will all be gone one day, I don’t feel bad about not making a permanent home for it.
I’ll second the changing table on each floor, so much easier than schlepping the baby around.
I have the grocery delivery service set where I can click ‘guess my order’, then schedule a delivery, and I’ll get the basics like milk, eggs, bread and bananas. Even when I can’t manage to plan a week of dinners, there’s enough in that delivery to keep DD fed for a few days, and we don’t have to do a huge shopping trip.
The only dusting that happens in my house is when DD runs around with a Swiffer and ‘cleans’. She’s actually getting pretty good at it…
My biggest life hack: I moved to a condo so I don’t have to do (much) maintenance and have almost no commute. Less space also means less stuff, which means “cleaning the house” now takes the same amount of time that “picking up the main floor” used to take in the ‘burbs.
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If kiddo spills something with many pieces (box of crayons, bowl of blueberries), I keep going with whatever I was doing and have her pick it up. She throws away her own diapers, she puts her laundry in the hamper, she finds her own shoes, she helps unload the grocery bags, she helps bring dishes to the table for meals.
I use my gas grill instead of my oven for everything other than baking cakes; it takes less time to preheat.
I’ve given up on bibs for meals; I’m doing the laundry anyway, so the bib is just another thing to clean. I’ve also started serving kiddo’s food on little plates instead of directly on her high chair tray; less to clean up.
Bottles and milk cups get put back in the fridge, rather than washed. When my little guy was on bottles, we just refilled the same one over and over until either it accidentally got left out for a while, we had to go out and couldn’t put it back in, or we realized that we’d been using it for more than a day or so. (This cut down on formula waste, too.) We use the same tactic with milk sippy cups – bedtime is “time to put the milk away.” (Obviously, we wash them eventually, just not every time.)
Not a big deal, but it sort of revolutionized my laundry thought process when it occurred to me to buy a second bottle of Shout for the bedroom upstairs. That way, if I get a stain, you can treat it and get changed at the same time, rather than putting it off because I didn’t feel like going all the way back to the laundry room. I also got a separate basket to put delicates in, so there’s no need to sort, and my husband keeps two – one for lights and one for darks.
We also make sure to plan for leftovers, for lunches and days when we don’t want to fix dinner, when cooking.
Have your child wear only one make/model of socks. For us, that’s the tri-fold Gap socks in gray. That’s all DS wears. Never have to match socks again!
I’m late to this discussion, but just want to say 1) you ladies are brilliant, so many great tips and 2) I feel so much better about the state of my house. Love the idea of de-prioritizing things. For me, it’s dog hair. We just live with it.
A working mother I had lunch with a few years ago introduced me to the concept of “things I don’t do.” It streamlines my mental space – I have a giant (mental) list of things I do not need to worry about because I do not do them. I could do them, I’m glad other people do them, I would even probably *like* to do them, but for me, right now, I just don’t.
I don’t:
craft,
knit (“but it’s fun to learn!” I’m sure it is but I’m not going to),
garden,
make vegetable broth from scratch (“but it’s so easy!” I know it is but I don’t do it),
iron,
wear concealer,
bake,
launder anything on a setting other than “warm/cool/tumble dry medium” – if it doesn’t survive, it doesn’t survive,
do anything that a professional or teenager could do more efficiently (mow the lawn, wash windows, paint, set up a website, etc.),
buy or even briefly consider heels over 2.5″ or bracelets of any kind,
pick up anything that can be delivered (dry cleaning, groceries, household supplies, gifts for all occasions, clothing),
clean anything that cannot be cleaned with vinegar or baking soda,
scrapbook or take photos,
and many other things that I don’t even know about because I don’t do them.
I DO add to the “donate” pile anything that does not immediately have a useful place in my home, write a very nice thank you note, and then never think about it again – that includes almost every gift I have ever received, regardless of the giver.