Our Strange House Rule

Everyone has standards and priorities for their home, whether it is making sure the house is vacuumed daily or the dishes are always done or any number of individual pet peeves.  In our home, we have an odd rule that applies every evening to keep our house up to mine and my husband's standards:

Once our kids are in bed, you would never guess we have any.

Allow me to explain.  Throughout the day, I hold no standards of picking up toys.  The kids pull toys into the living room, dining room and kitchen and are not required to put them away when they are finished.  The idea of enforcing picking up toys all day long sounds exhausting to me, so I just don't do it.

Instead, every night we have "pick-up time" in which every member of the family helps pick up and put away all the toys scattered around the house.  Every toy has a home, mainly in the children's rooms.  By the time they are in bed, and their bedroom doors are closed, there is not a toy to be seen.  The only remnants of the existence of children in our home are some cloth diapers in the diapering station and a high chair in the dining room.

We are not trying to hide the fact that we have children, but by creating an adult-only home every evening, it helps my husband and I relax and unwind.  It turns our home into a temporary sophisticated place where we can read, watch television, and have adult conversations without tripping over Transformers or sitting on rubber duckies.

We love our children dearly, but every parent needs some adult-only time.  Why wait for a once-a-month date night when you can create it every night in your very own home?