Deep Cleaning With Kids!

On Saturday I decided to finally just start full force cleaning our house top to bottom(actually it's more like bottom to top). We started with our living room since it is the first room you see when you walk into our house and really is the only room we use all the time. It started with my dumping everything onto the floor, I wish I was kidding, and literally going through items one by one until we had a huge bag of trash filled and a huge bag of donations filled. It's crazy how once you get rid of almost everything in your living room how much space you end up with. We try very hard to ignore the fact we shoved all the "non living room" items into the dining room for the time being-that's this Saturdays project. My biggest tip for cleaning with kids, take it one room at a time, there's no reason(for us at least) to tackle all the rooms at the same time it's just going to overwhelm everyone involved. Another tip that helped us is bribery, yes we bribe our kids to clean they do not get paid nor do they get a new toy-so what's their reward?! Normally a special snack we wouldn't buy, in our family we don't really buy individual snacks anyway so for us it's pretty easy to make this a special surprise. However, there are times we do something a little bigger and take them out to eat or to go bowling depending on the chore(when we do the basement that will be the reward for sure!). Those two little things have helped us a lot, though our kids are still not nearly as excited as I am about cleaning they at least have some kind of interest. They should just look at it this way, once we clean every room we're good for awhile! There's always a bright spot to look forward to and that is it. Wish my poor kids luck on dealing with me and whatever cleaning bug I seem to have gotten bit by.