Domestic Engineering: Maintaining the Mess Hall

Some days I respond impatiently when my kids spill food or interrupt my work in the kitchen.

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Other days I see those inconveniences as opportunities to show them grace and to train them.

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Every day my solid hope is Christ and one day feasting with him.

mess hall (noun)

A room or building where groups of people, especially soldiers, eat together.

- The Oxford Dictionary 

The rooms where food is prepared and consumed in massive quantities. Often, these rooms are strewn with crumbs, sticky liquids, and dirty dishes.

- The Heather Schultz Dictionary

Ever feel like keeping your kitchen clean is a constant battle? I do.

There's a direct correlation in my life between the smoothness of a day and the cleanliness of our eating areas. If my day has been tumultuous, you will find my kitchen in disarray.

Perfect days don't happen. I'm finite, sinful, and the effects of sin impact every area of life. But I have discovered several helpful ways to push back the consequences of the fall in my kitchen.

In this post, I'm going to share ten easy tips on how to keep your "mess halls" clean with your kids' help.

Reality Check

I first want to address a regular temptation in my own life. That is the temptation to put my hope in my children maturing, instead of in Christ.

I am tempted to anger when my kids make another mess at the kitchen table. I will moan and grumble when they interrupt my train of thought while I'm trying to make dinner. These responses are sinful.

It is good and appropriate to train my kids to eat neatly and interrupt politely. We even have a code phrase of "Chair check!" to remind our girls to sit properly while eating. Yet I can't put my hope in them growing up.

Instead, my hope must be in the truth that Christ has paid for these sins. He knew I would commit them (and countless others) yet he still chose to set his love on me.

Motivated out of love for him, I'm then free to serve my family with joy and can accept when things don't go the way I want.

"For the love of Christ controls us, because we have concluded this: that one has died for all, therefore all have died; and he died for all, that those who live might no longer live for themselves but for him who for their sake died and was raised." 2 Corinthians 5:14–15

Four Mess Hall Maintenance Strategies

1. Do the dishes right away. 

I love the way Dana White describes "Dishes Math":

"Dirty dishes defy mathematical logic. 

One day’s worth of dirty dishes can be washed in X amount of time.

Two days' worth of dirty dishes require 4X time.

Three days' worth of dirty dishes require more than 7X that time. 

Please don’t analyze my algebraicish equations. Just get the point. The time required to clean the kitchen daily is SO MUCH LESS than if you let it go for even one extra day. " 

~ Five Truths About Keeping the Kitchen Clean, emphasis added

• If you can't clean the dishes immediately, fill your sink with water to soak them so the food doesn't harden.

• If you (like me) tend to think cleaning up will take ages, set a timer for ten minutes. It's amazing how much can get done with ten minutes of hard work.

2. Put clean dishes away as soon as they're dry. 

(Notice a pattern forming about not procrastinating?)

• If you wash dishes by hand, ditch any drying racks you own. Instead, have a designated towel to dry the clean items immediately. We have a hidden over-the-cabinet towel bar for such occasions.
• The one exception I take to this is drying steak knives. Since they're serrated and can shred my drying towel, I use this fun drying rack to hold them as they dry.

3. Make a game of seeing how few dishes you can use when you're cooking. 

• My husband finds the post-meal kitchen apocalypses I create overwhelming. I find his request to minimize the number of dishes I use hard to remember. But I do like games and challenges so this is my working compromise.

4. Sweep once a day. 

• Make sure you first clean surfaces top to bottom so you don't drop table crumbs onto the floor after you've swept. (Not at all speaking from experience here.)

Six Ways to Involve Your Kids

1. Store the kid dishes down low so they can help you set the table.

2. Make it easy for them to clean up after themselves.

We do this by having the following accessible:

• A washcloth bin to wipe up liquids
• A small hand broom to sweep up crumbs
• A cordless handheld vacuum to clean up spills (including dirt from shoes)

3. Train them to sweep using a square target on the floor made with painter's tape.

4. Have an assigned water cup (or bottle) for each child.

• This reduces dishes and makes it easy to hold them accountable for drinking water.
• The Munchkin 360 cups are our favorite training and sippy cups.

5. Have an accessible spot in the fridge for their milk cup.

• I only allow water throughout our house to avoid stains. As a result, our girls' milk cups were often forgotten at the table after meals. Now, they are responsible to put their milk away after each meal and we seldom end up with soured milk.

6. Finally, train them to set the table, put clean silverware away, and eventually the dishes. 

I hope the above tips to make it easier to bless and serve your family. But my greater desire is that you put your hope in Christ. He doesn't change. Our children's maturation and the quantity of food consumption in our homes will.

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* Photo by rawpixel.com on Pexels.