State of My House

 Warning: this is the whine of the privileged, and I know it.

Our house is a very very very fine house. 

We recognize that we built it to be larger than we needed it then or now.  We joke that we're going to keep having kids until all 5 bedrooms are full.  We're still expecting my Grandmother to move in with us sometime in the next year so that will help fill us up a little. But all the same, we know that it's our fault that we have a house that takes a lot of time to clean.  So this whine is from a position of privilege and might be as annoying as when a rich person complains about a restaurant bill.  

(By the way, we're watching the 1940 black and white film of "Grapes of Wrath" while I write this. Talk about putting things into perspective!)

State of My House:

We have a leaky roof above the garage and the foyer that I keep taking one step forward and two steps back regarding fixing.  Something more pressing or interesting keeps coming up.  

And we have a lot of painting, tile work, and trim work left to do in the rooms that we already altered for the addition.  Plus we've removed some of the crappy parts that were here when we got here (like gross carpet and light fixtures) but haven't finished replacing all of them.  So our house is chock full of to-do projects.

But overall, the house projects are mostly done and I'll always be grateful and amazed that Jeremiah and his crew of family and friends were able to do such extensive renovations basically within the span of one pregnancy!  (I mostly held down the fort with the house maintenance, food management, and childcare duties.)

Still, as everyone who's ever left home knows, the house maintenance is never done.  I just want to explain that the rest of my house, the non-project parts, are what I consider maintainable. The rest I don't even bother with. 

I laugh anytime anyone suggests that I should just ease off of the housework as a way to give myself a break.  Honey, I let that go before we even moved to this house 3 1/2 years ago! On the days that Jeremiah's not here or I'm sick, it takes twice as long to recover from the setback on the daily chores. So it's not that we don't clean.  (there's so much food and poop and pee to clean, all the time!)  It's just that we've cut back to less than monthly work on some of the dirtier chores, like dusting, vacuuming, and cleaning the bathtub, fridge, etc.  

If I let the state of my house drop any further, it would be unlivable.

Best Moment of the day: family dance party after dinner. We all needed a good hoedown.  

Worst Moment of the day: Carseats are easy to assemble but impossibly hard to install.  Yesterday J. peed in her 1st carseat coming home from preschool so I had to take it apart to wash the carseat cover.  Today J. peed in her 2nd carseat coming home from preschool so I had to take it apart to wash the carseat cover. And then due to a series of frustrating decisions, I had to run out to pick up the carryout dinner that I ordered and take the two kids with me. But, oh yeah- the 1st carseat needs to be reassembled and installed. And it was not easy doing that under pressure and in the rain with two kids and food "that's been sitting here waiting for you for 20 minutes now, m'am."  And when I considered that she might have another accident on this carseat cover while we were out getting food, I had to fight back pure rage. Geez.

Thoughts of the day:

We were going to go out to dinner tonight and have a babysitter. We didn't. Thank you Jeremiah for trying to get us on a date. Thank you Jenny for volunteering to babysit for us. We're going to keep trying and hopefully find the time and mindset to genuinely make it happen  sometime soon.  Sometimes you're so down, the thought of "going out" is just too much work and it would just be better to watch a dvd and hit the sack early.