I am linking up with Passionate and Creative Homemaking today to talk about what homemaking looks like at our house. 

I’ll start off by saying that when I was growing up, my mom worked outside the home, yet it seemed almost all of the homemaking was HER responsibility.  Well, hers and mine.  From my perspective, my dad would work (sometimes late hours in retail) and then would come home, plant himself in front of the t.v. in his favorite brown recliner and still be there when I went to bed hours later.  Going back one more generation, my Mamaw (maternal grandmother), waited hand and foot on my Papaw.  I will always be able to hear him yelling “Mary Bell!” (pronounced Murr-bell), as he beckoned her from another room to hand him something that was less than 3 feet away. 

When my husband and I were engaged we went to pre-marital counseling with a Christian counselor.  She had us fill in workbooks that had a lot to do with our expectations and then we would calmly discuss scream and cry in her office until we came to some compromise.  It was really helpful.  But not because we worked all that out and had a plan as to who would do the dishes, who would wash the laundry, etc.  It was helpful because it showed us that he had one set of ideas about how things should go and I had a COMPLETELY different idea. Which really sort-of prepared us for the first few ten years of our marriage.

We will be celebrating our tenth year of marriage on March 22nd this year.  And at this point in our lives, this is what homemaking looks like.

• We both cook. I cook breakfast and lunch for the kids while he is gone.  I cook most of our dinners but that is because he doesn’t get home until after 5pm and by then the natives are getting restless.  When Chris is home though, he enjoys cooking.  He really likes trying new recipes for meals and desserts.  I feel like if he had more time at home he would take a bigger role in this area.
• We both clean.  Again, I do the majority of this because I am home but Chris and the kids do a lot of laundry and dishes and general picking up. Chris will scrub the tub for me because that is a chore I detest.  Most of the deep cleaning chores are done by me, but as long as I have a little time to do them I actually enjoy this.
• We both make a menu, grocery list and do the shopping.  I really struggle in this area.  I hate making a menu for the week, I don’t enjoy cutting coupons or finding bargains (like some people I know).  I don’t mind the cooking, but it’s still a learning process for me!
• We both take care of the kids.  Except for Jonah who is still exclusively breast-fed, Chris and I split the care of the kids.  We both give baths, help with getting people dressed, fed, cleaned-up, medicine or band-aids delivered and tucked into bed.  The one thing I do that Chris hasn’t ever done because he has no desire and I don’t mind it is cut fingernails and toenails.  That may seem like such a small thing but we have 5 children who need that done at least once a week. You do the math. (Dirty, long fingernails are a pet peeve of mine.) 
• We both discipline.  We have our own tool bag of consequences from which to pull ranging from time-out to spankings to loss of privileges.  We try to respect and stay out of a disciplinary action as it is taking place. For example, if Parker hits Theodore and Chris is in the room, he will tell Parker to go take Parker to time-out.  When the timer beeps Parker is sent to speak with Chris, not me.  He will talk with him and Theodore and have Parker apologize.  It is extremely disrespectful of one parent to interrupt, defend or change the discipline of another parent in front of the child.  We are a team and try to present a united front.  That said, we both mess this up from time to time.  Either I think Chris is being too lenient or he thinks I am being too harsh, somehow we end up arguing with each other when we let our opinions come out at the moment in front of the kids. Better to wait and discuss it after bedtime.

It has taken us all of our marriage to get to this point. As our family has grown, as we have matured and our relationship and love has grown deeper, the way homemaking looks in our family has changed many times.  Thankfully, God loves us and continues to honor our desire to have a stable, Christian home.  The most consistent aspect to our homemaking is that it is always changing!