Wanted: A New Cleaning Lady

...because the one I have stinks! She is just so darned inconsistent! I am sitting at my computer in the kitchen right now, sunlight streaming through the windows and dancing across clean countertops and my beautiful new table. No dishes remain from last night's dinner. I can walk across the floor without feeling crunching under my feet. And it will only take me a minute to clean up the breakfast dishes and the baby's high chair, leaving my kitchen the way I prefer it - sparkling clean. But how long will it last? Two days ago, there were piles of dirty dishes on the counters, the sink overflowed with them, and just be glad you didn't try to walk across the floor in bare feet.

And don't get me started on laundry! This inept housekeeper of mine works her tail off to catch up on laundry, and everything in the house is clean. Then suddenly, she turns around to find that no one in the house has clean underwear. I know she's trying hard, and that she usually thinks she's keeping up with things, but they get out of control so fast! It seems that we're either in a state of chaos (most of the time), or I'm stressed out every second trying to keep everything perfect. There's no middle ground!

I'm hoping the cleaning lady will get some spring cleaning done in the basement and bedrooms this weekend - it's time to start turning her attention to the yard and the garden, and the house needs to be in good order first. I'm just praying that she can maintain the clean areas of the house while focusing on the not-so-clean parts.

So for any of you who've mistaken my blog title for a declaration of my awesomeness, please note the "in training" part. I won't lie. I got me some mad skillz in the kitchen. I can whip up anything I put my mind to on a sewing machine. And I found out last year that gardening is a simple matter of planting things and watering them, and that anyone who wants to can, can. Don't get me wrong, I know how to clean. My mom taught me how to scrub the heck out of a toilet, and I run my vacuum daily. I just need some help in maintaining a consistent level of cleanliness throughout the house, so that I'm not constantly running to catch up.

Words every mother longs to hear:

After everyone else had finished eating, Katelyn and I ended up alone at the dinner table tonight. We had a little discussion about healthy eating habits. Then I stood up to clear the dishes while she finished eating and this is what she said to me:

"You know what I decided to do when dinner is so yucky? I decided to eat it all anyway."

I'm learning nightly (from all of the kids, not just Katelyn) that the meals I put so much thought and effort into are pretty gross. It's really fun to watch your 12-year-old fill his glass over and over to wash down the icky veggies he doesn't want to eat. At least he's still doing what he's asked, right? Oh, the joys of being a mother!

Help!

I am seriously addicted, and my husband is an enabler! My love of shoes is turning to obsession....

(Thanks for the awesome birthday presents, hubby, and everyone else. I'm a spoiled girl!)

Taking out the trash

I'm trying to decide if what I'm about to confess is going to get me arrested or in trouble with someone, somewhere....

It is really, really, really windy here today. As we speak, the swing on my back patio is lying on its side in the grass, and I'm not going to bother to put it back up until the tornado passes us by. As I turned onto our street, coming home from Katelyn's dance class, I noticed the neighbor's garbage can lying on its side with a few items spilling onto the street. My first thought was, "Thank goodness our can is still standing." I would hate to have to pick up all of my gross trash and put it back in the can, not to mention having things not meant to be seen by others blowing about the neighborhood. (I have to admit that as I started composing this post in my head, my conscience forced me to run across the street and pick up the neighbor's can. I don't trust the garbage men to get out of their fully-automated truck and pick up the can so that it can be emptied by said truck. Luckily nothing too disgusting was on the ground for me to pick up!) This line of thinking led me to reminisce about the things that have gone out with our trash, that I would NOT want to pick up off of the street and put back in our can. You're dying for me to share, right?

When we were first married, we were given a gigantic fish tank by some friends who were moving out of state and couldn't keep it. We took great pride in buying exotic, often expensive, fish for the tank. We spent hours watching that tank, and it was quite relaxing. It was also very frustrating when exotic, expensive fish didn't live long. We flushed a lot of fish, unless they were too big to be flushed down our apartment toilet. One very vivid memory I have is of me carrying a very full bag of garbage down 3 flights of stairs, out of the building, and across the parking lot to the dumpster. I tried to keep the bag as far from my body as possible, because sitting on top of the other nastiness was a gigantic one of these:
You can't tell from the picture, but this fish was at least 12 inches long, and his eyeballs had been eaten out by his dear fish friends. I am a screamer, and I guarantee that people were looking out their windows to see what the fuss was, because every time that bag bumped my leg I shrieked!

A few months ago, there was something much worse in our can outside. Fortunately, I was not the one to carry it out. Remember this guy?

This snake won me great acclaim in the neighborhood as the cool mom who let her son have a 6-foot boa constrictor in his bedroom, in my house! Unfortunately for Tanner, my husband, and Bo the snake, he never got acclimated enough to his environment to feel comfortable eating, and eventually died of starvation. It didn't occur to me at the time that maybe we should have buried him. I was not in any way a witness to his exit from our home. The shrieking would have prompted 9-1-1 calls from our neighbors, to be sure!

I'm not feeling like I should share any more confessions with you today. But I can tell you how glad I am that my profession is not that of a sanitation engineer. And I'm thinking I'll stay away from the dump for the rest of my life....

How about you? Any confessions?