Good and Productive

Let the spring cleaning commence!! I delved into my twice a year routine of cleaning out closets today and with gusto. Typically, I don’t do much nesting when I’m pregnant. And when I do, it generally manifests in cooking and baking, not cleaning. But I’m a bit of a freak about closets. I get crazy when the kids’ clothes get out of hand. The Girl has grown 7 inches in the last nine months and The Boy has grown almost 6 inches in the last year, so the majority of their clothing no longer fits and just gets in the way. There are tangles of t-shirts and socks mixed in with sweat pants and shorts and it just flat makes me crazy. Plus it was time to re-organize my own closet to better reflect, well, the clothes I can actually wear at the moment. It was the maternity overhaul I’ve done twice before in an effort to shove my regular clothes to the side and fully embrace and celebrate my growing belly for the next several months. I’m usually pretty good at not being too hard on myself about gaining weight when I’m pregnant or allowing my growing belly to change the way I feel about how I look. If anything I typically feel that much more powerful, it’s pretty cool. But I’ll take all the help I can get, hence the closet shift.

And we got the house mostly cleaned today and caught up on laundry. It was a pretty busy day all in all and I was grateful that I felt good enough to be doing it all. I’ve been struggling for the last week with recurring migraines that have been kicking my ass and I was just thrilled to be able to be productive today without also being in pain.

My husband and I called it quits late afternoon when the kids found play mates braving the rain and the cold to come and ask if they could play and we found The Breakfast Club on TV. I said lines along with Bender and the rest of the crew while my husband snored loudly in the background. It was a good day.

2/6/10 - Lazy Saturday

It has been snowing all day. Seriously. All. Day. We got the house picked up and cleaned (well the most important parts anyway) this morning, I put a big pot of chili on the stove and we played the Wii and ate Frito pie the rest of the day. Productive and healthy? Not so much. Lovely way to spend my Saturday with my family? Yep.

Frito pie has always something that held little interest for me. Mostly I think because traditional Frito pies involve a lot of onions and I don’t do onions. At. All. So I just kind of wrote them off. But what’s not to like about a layer of Fritos covered with homemade chili, cheese, sour cream and avocado? Seriously yummy. And with a good deal of comfort as well.

I also finished the second book in Anne McCaffrey’s Dragonriders of Pern series. It’s also very good. Although she drops a bombshell at the end and almost kills one of my favorite characters out of nowhere about 10 pages from the end of the book. Seriously. That is just not nice. And because I was all amped up after reading the second book, I had to pick up the third immediately. I was going to put off the third one for a while to pick up some Ray Bradbury and possibly some James Patterson and/or Tom Clancy, but I just couldn’t help it. So our trip to the library to stock up on books I’ve never read is going to have to wait a bit longer until I finish this book.

One of the interesting things I’m finding is that she doesn’t really feel the need to explain what things are. They just are. And that is one of the things that has always seriously daunted me about writing sci-fi stories - how the hell do you explain everything to everyone? Yeah. She doesn’t. It’s actually sort of a relief as a reader too, because I don’t really want to read explanations about stuff, I want the story. Much like I don’t have to describe what a door is, she sees no reason why she should explain what a wherrie is. Cool.

10/2/09 - Surface Cleaning

** Sorry!! I forgot to post this last night! **

So here is the problem with having house cleaning so far down my list of priorities: when a friend comes to visit and I realize my house is a hot mess, I have to run around like a chicken with its head cut off for an entire morning trying to make it look presentable.

I guess since we just don’t get many visitors that I forgot to look at my house occasionally as if I didn’t live there. Until this morning when lovely J and her sweet boy M were on their way to our house for lunch. And all I could see was dust and dirt and doggie foot prints and dirty dishes (hmmm, all of that starts with D, how interesting). So I whipped myself into a whirlwind and got things set back to order. Sort of. It was better than nothing.

But it also made me see the things that just are not on my radar from a day to day basis. Like the baseboards and the wreck they are. I mean we have lived in this house for 7 years now, and it wasn’t new when we moved in, so it is normal that it should start showing some well lived in wear and tear. Plus we have two whirligig children and three obnoxious dogs. But our baseboards are a mess. I’d like to rip them all out and put in new ones. Fresh, white ones with no dust or wood splinters. And the corners of many walls are chipped from being banged with swords and baby heads and wagons and blocks (and my mom’s wheelchair) that we really should patch up and re-paint.

There are just tons of things like that. And it is my head taking over and muttering a string of “oh my god she’s totally judging me for my baseboards and look at the dent in that wall from where The Boy slammed open the door and the sliding glass door is wrecked from the neurotic chocolate lab who scratches at it constantly and blah, blah, blah” whenever we have people over.

So what have I learned? Not to pay too close attention when I’m cleaning, obviously.

Housewives

My husband is a much better housewife than I am. He says he gets it from his mother, which I believe as she always has a clean, put together house regardless of how many houseguests she’s happened to have. It’s habit for him. But it’s also just how he likes his house to be. Clean. Put away. Organized.

I on the other hand, just don’t care as much. I mean yes I vacuum, dust, do laundry and dishes on a regular basis. All of the stuff that is necessary to keep my children happy, healthy and clothed. But until just a few months ago I had never once thought about cleaning the baseboards. And I can confidently say that I never would have completely emptied our garage just to sweep the leaves out. And I have always hated cleaning bathrooms. When living by myself, I’d do it, but now that he does it so easily (and frequently) it’s just not something that I think about anymore.

I don’t mind piles. I don’t mind having to dig through a laundry pile to find a particular shirt. I don’t mind having a few dishes piled up in the sink. My husband on the other hand, had been home for about 10 minutes before he was cleaning. Keep in mind that he had been gone for close to 5 months. And what does he do the moment he arrives? Clean. Put away. Organize.

It drives me crazy sometimes. I mean, yes, I’m grateful that he’s so on top of it. But there just seems to be better ways to spend our weekends. And every time he steam cleans the carpet I feel like I should be wearing a giant sandwich board that says “I’m a horrible housewife!”

It’s just really not that high of a priority for me. I like to have a clean house, don’t get me wrong. But there are plenty of things that I like more. Probably I should just put my sandwich board down and walk away. Simply be grateful that my husband likes to clean. Or I could purposefully make more piles for him to organize. But that would be mean wouldn’t it?