Okay, I confess, floors are a problem here! Let me tell you why. Our current home is on a cement slap. It’s has three doors going to two yards. One yard the chickens run in. The other yard is our gardens. It rains here a lot. When you walk into the house, your immediately in the kitchen or next to the staircase, which is next to the kitchen. One enters into the utility room, but we keep this door locked. The children are in and out so often that it can be hard to keep them held to the shoes off, shoes on rule.

We have these latches on our doors, they work great. We have them low enough for our 5 year old to use, but too high for the 1 and 3 year olds. We use them a lot to prevent the toddler from running outside constantly, so they consolidate their outside play. They play outside a lot and they generally do really well with taking off their shoes. Sometimes they forget.

Nevertheless, the floors are constantly filthy. Food is an issue, of course we try to keep it swept up but things manage to run off to other locations as well. It seems like food is everywhere with 3 kids, despite them sitting to eat meals (which yes they do, 95% of the time).

So, we are working extra hard to do some floor practical life. I am not much of a homemaker, and the floors are old so it’s a challenge, but finding ways to make cleaning the floor more “playful” for the children, so as they can help me as much as they wish and then go off and play while I finish the floor. I find this way I have much less resistance to my cleaning and not playing with them.

One of my favorite tools for helping to get the kids to pick up the floor is our Bissell Featherweight. All of the kids can easily use it. Because it’s meant to be converted into a handheld vacuum, we use take the handle off and Noodle can use it perfectly that way. Apple and Cookie have no problem using it with the handle, and they also have no issue converting it for different uses.