How To Get The Most From Your Home Help

Motivation is a key ingredient to any successful working relationship. Achievement, recognition, personal development and status are just some of the factors that are used to stimulate employee productivity. If they don’t work, there’s always holiday, home time, coffee breaks, extended toilet breaks and payday.

As a Domestic Volunteer, plucked from a world where money was plentiful, recognition was a yearly occurrence, coffee breaks were regular and home time was guaranteed, being stripped of all benefits and left in a permanent state of home time with my newborn was nothing short of shocking. Seventeen months later, home time no longer holds the same appeal it once did and I’ve had to carefully reselect which of the available carrots were going to help me through my day.


Firstly, following some on the job training, the Mummy Mission Statement was drafted:

To keep baby and husband alive and the house clean and tidy whilst incurring the least amount of aggravation/noise/hassle/screaming/squealing/squirming/tantrums

This is not easily accomplished and involves the employment of varied and innovative tactics. The more experienced the mummy, the larger the arsenal of munitions available. The most coveted of outcomes during daylight hours is that baby takes a long, long nap. At nighttime, that baby sleeps soundly for twelve hours plus. You’ll notice that unconsciousness is a major player in the minimisation of aggravation/noise/hassle/screaming/squealing/squirming/tantrums. For those times when consciousness is unavoidable, you ideally want baby to be engrossed in a calm and peaceful activity for many hours.

Sound easy? Well, don’t be fooled. It’s a perilous undertaking fraught with danger and potential obstacles. There’s hunger, digestive discomfort, mood swings, bowel movements, tiredness, lack of fluids, constipation, vaccination reactions, lack of attention, illness, lack of stimulation, too much stimulation, the want want gimme gimme’s, too hot, too cold, boredom, falling asleep at the wrong time/place and not going to sleep at the right time/place, oversleeping, disrupted nighttime sleep and unexpected noise during light sleep stage, to name but a few. Any of these factors can upset baby’s delicate constitution and result in a series of nightmare situations incurring aggravation/noise/hassle/screaming/squealing/squirming/tantrums.

For those days that do just go horribly wrong, the housewife may not have such glamorous motivators as holiday, money and private medical insurance to keep her going but she can always make time for a coffee break. She may be sipping her Nescafe to a backdrop of brain battering screaming whilst being slapped around the head with a stacka cup, but the caffeine will work it’s magic nonetheless.