The more homemaking skills you know and practice, the better of a homemaker you will be. And the beauty of it? You get to create the rhythms in your home! Take a look at these homemaking skills to learn after you get married.
Building your first home with your husband is nothing short of an incredible experience. All of the dreams that have lingered in your mind from dating finally have a foundation to take hold of. It isn’t just talk anymore – it’s time to walk the walk!
In Essential Homemaking Skills to Develop Before Marriage, I talked about 5 key areas in your life you can develop prior to getting marriage that would benefit your home. They were –
- Cooking
- Cleaning and Laundry
- Crafting
- Money Management
- Time Management
In this post, I’m going to be talking about other homemaking skills you can develop after you get married. Those skills are –
- Hospitality
- Establishing routines
- Caring for children
- Caring for others
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Why separate the two?
If you’re anything like me, it’s easy to get overwhelmed researching the best way to do something and then finding ways to actively incorporate it into your life. So as a means to reduce overwhelm, I decided to break up my list.
I also decided to emphasize building one set of skills prior to marriage because those are skills that immediately apply to married life. It’s also easy to forget about them when you hear wedding bells ringing. Cooking and cleaning for yourself or your family is one thing. But when you’re trying to navigate the curveballs of moving in with someone and learning quirks, it’s helpful to have a few, foundational skills to fall back on.
I’d like to emphasize what a transitional time it is in your life! That’s where learning time and money management come in. Buying a home, furnishing a home, balancing work schedules and more – they all take time and money. Developing healthy habits will make your transition into marriage as a couple sail quite a bit smoother if you’re able to mature in those areas as singles.
So how does hospitality, routines and caring for others impact me after marriage?
They don’t call it the honeymoon period for nothing. The thrill of becoming one with your husband should be celebrated! But it’s important to remember that we are called to be kind, courteous and hospitable to people outside our home as well.
My journey to this understanding was anything but easy. To read more about how I came to embrace homemaking, read this post.
Essential Homemaking Skills: Hospitality
Welcoming people in to your home may bless your guests, but you are the one who will walk away much more fulfilled.
It’s an incredibly humbling experience. When you can learn to make others feel welcome in your home, you will learn to listen to them. Bear their burdens. And rejoice when they have great news. Sharing a meal is also a very intimate act. And while it’s the one we usually think of, don’t let it be the only time you welcome others over! A few ideas for initiating hospitality –
- Host a game night
- Have a friend over for coffee
- Host a Bible study in your home
- Invite other women your age over for fellowship. Play games and prepare questions to stimulate conversation
- Do you know a friend trying to build a business? Host others in your home to listen to service opportunities and to get to know more about this business.
- Have an older couple over for dinner
- Have a play date with other children similar in age to your own
Hospitality is also a wonderful way to learn about things outside of your personal beliefs. Having someone in to your home to share a meal is an easy way to learn about new things.
Essential Homemaking Skills: Establishing Routines
If you are anything like the average person, establishing a routine doesn’t come naturally. It’s almost like our routines come after things like work and social engagements. But I would challenge you to create them first and let work and the like follow.
How can you do that? By prioritizing what’s important for your family members.
Do you find that you and your partner need rest? Let social engagements slide for a season, and really work on finding pockets of rest in your week. Do you have young children who need immense amounts of engagement and help completing simple tasks? Find pockets of rest!
Other routines could be things like a meal rotation, cleaning routine, laundry routine, and even finding ways to get outside time or screen-free time every day.
There doesn’t have to be a routine for everything in your life. Think of it as finding the best possible way to incorporate many things into your life.
I touch on creating a homemaking routine in this post.
Necessary Things that Aren’t Routine
Let’s zoom out for a second and consider things like home maintenance or basic skills that just take extra time to learn. Yard work, or maybe building vegetable gardens, staying up on vehicle maintenance, and remembering to pay your annual taxes are all out of the ordinary for your every day life. However, they are still a necessary part of your homemaking routine. Now, in our home, the majority of those things fall out of my scope of responsibility. But it’s still a good idea to keep tabs on them. Be a great help to your husband.
Did you read about skills to develop prior to marriage for more homemaking ideas?
Essential Homemaking Skills: Caring for Children
As a mother to two young children (as I’m writing this my children are one and three years old) I know a lot about what goes into caring for children. I can never leave the house without a diaper. My youngest can pick up toys, but can’t dress themselves. My oldest still needs assistance washing their hands. But when I say “develop skills that involve caring for children,” I don’t mean your basic knowledge that comes with children when you birth them.
Children require an immense amount of patience and relying on God. While temper tantrums and fits abound, you don’t have to take part in them. When you establish healthy ways to deal with conflict, diffuse arguments and lead by example, you will be well on your way to caring for children.
For more practical, hands-on ways to caring for children, consider –
- Learning child and infant CPR
- Finding age-appropriate games and toys for infants, toddlers and beyond
- Familiarize yourself with what God has to say about children
- Spend time with mothers you know. Caring for children not only differs per child, but it differs based on how old a child may be.
A Note of Encouragement
Think of how you could change you’re family if you were able to show your children what an important role managing your home well plays in their lives. Your greatest encouragement could be a simple meal or a little time spent with them. They may look back on the fact you always had homemade bread going in the oven. Developing homemaking skills doesn’t just impact you – it impacts your family!
Essential Homemaking Skills: Caring for Others
As a homemaker, your focus is usually beyond yourself. How is your husband doing? How are your children doing? And sometimes, it’s easy to forget that there are members of your community that need a bit of your attention, too.
A few communities you could focus on are older women, widows and widowers, the chronically ill and those without families. You could also make a ministry out of caring for young families or single women.
And what’s wonderful is – you won’t be doing anything different than what we’ve already talked about! Invite these people into your home. Learn from them. Hear their stories. Or surprise them with a favorite treat, meal or gift from time to time. A five course dinner isn’t always necessary to let someone know you care. What’s even better? None of these require much money, if any!
A Note of Encouragement
Developing homemaking skills has taken a hit with the rise of the industrial revolution. For the last 70 years or so, women have been encouraged to work outside the home. Working on becoming a hospitable, organized and home-focused woman is somehow an antiquated idea. These are now old-fashioned homemaking skills. Why would we learn how to properly launder our clothes and care for our home when we can lease that out to modern conveniences?
And if you aren’t hearing that domestic skills aren’t something to focus on, you’re probably hearing the other end of the spectrum. That cooking and cleaning are “women’s work.”
Can I just encourage you with this? You are building essential skills that will make a big difference in the lives of your family members. What we might see as basic homemaking skills doesn’t take away from the fact it’s still hard work. Making your own food is hard work. Taking care of children is hard work. Deciding to do these things on a daily basis is hard work. Because the work is never ending! Creating a relaxing home and being a safe space for your family is hard work!
So don’t get discouraged when others begin knocking the idea of being a traditional homemaker. Prioritizing these life skills will impact your home management in ways you can’t imagine!
My Biggest Tip for the New Homemaker
If I could tell any new homemaker my best tip for homemaking, it would be get off social media. So much of our time seems to be taken up by our phones these days. But what is this doing to you and your home? If you’re able to search for ideas and inspiration, great. But if you find yourself pining after something someone else has or looking at your home with disappointment, it’s simply not worth your time. Especially if you’re in your first year of marriage. Finding what works for you and your family is going to take time! Don’t let what someone else has spent a long time building discourage you. Spend your time wisely and focus on becoming an effective homemaker in your own right.
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