So, I've been spending an awful lot of time at home, and I've noticed that the things that I expected to take up almost all of my time - cooking and cleaning - well, aren't. When my house was a disaster I could spend the entire day cleaning it just to make some progress, but after a month or so of keeping up with it I realized it only takes a few minutes to keep it clean. My meal prep and planning is also a cinch, since I'm still making huge one-pot or one-dish meals with planned leftovers like I did when I was working. The first couple weeks I spent some of the extra time baking, but we can only eat so much bread and brownies before that starts to seem like a bad idea.
So, what exactly is it I should be doing with my time? I'm still only working part time, about 9 hours a week, and have the rest of the time to work on managing our money, improving our home, and . . . I don't even know what else people do. I wanted to take part of this summer to learn some new domestic skills, grandmother skills as I like to think of them, but I don't know what to learn or where to look. So, dear reader, I pose this question to you. What domestic skills are essential, and what are nice to have? Gourmet cooking? Decorating? Crafting? Ironing? (Please don't say ironing, please dont' say ironing, lol)
All comments are welcome!
Ironing!!(Just kidding.)
ReplyDeleteI lack most of the skills you list--decorating, crafting. Although I am handy with an iron (but have only 1 or 2 items that get ironed only on an as-needed basis)! So after reading this I found myself asking "what do I do when I am not working?"
I write. I read. I pull weeds in the vegetable garden. (I don't do landscapes or flower gardens.) I look at the shower stall that really needs a good scrubbing out...nah, tomorrow. I go swimming or walking. I read more. I write more.
I volunteer. A lot. I suspect a lot of our grandmothers, even the "small town" ones, did a lot more "community work" than we realize, because that was the fabric of the community, on a neighborhood or town level.
Hmmn. I need to go write about that!