How Does the Baby Affect Housework? - 12 Week Update

Does having a baby mean you do ridiculous amounts of laundry?

Laundry

To track how much laundry we do, I simply track the number of loads we run each month. I'd initially thought we'd see a massive increase in the amount of laundry we do, but as you can see from the chart at the top, we actually do significantly less laundry now. How is that possible?

It turns out that because we spend time with the baby and have very little pride, we just started wearing dirty clothes all the time so that we don't waste time on laundry. The baby does go through a lot of clothes, but if you add five pairs of clothes for him and remove one pair of blue jeans from me, you end up with a net reduction in laundry. Exacerbating this effect is the fact that my wife is on FMLA through early January so she has no reason to wash her clothes.

Dishes

The chart below shows our dishwasher usage.

As can be easily seen, this increased dramatically. Bottles are basically the reason for this. We likely average four bottles per day (I haven't tracked this so this is just a guess), and it's resulted in us doing an extra couple of loads of dishes per week. It's actually worse than what's shown in this chart because we often wash the bottles outside of the dishwasher and that isn't captured here.

Important Note

The month of October is not very good for comparisons because we had family visiting that month and they produced laundry and dishes.