Making My Home Acceptably Clean
Last December, I looked around my house and decided that something needed to change. My house was not organized, not clean, and making my husband and me unhappy. I have never been particularly concerned with an amazingly neat home, and I have a high tolerance for how messy the place is when company visits. I do like my home to be clean, but I’m not into “spotless.” The condition of my house had crossed all my lines, though. How did it happen?
Labor Day weekend, 2010, I went for a 10 mile run. It was good. I was in the final stages of preparing for a half marathon, and it was the best run of my life. Two days later I went for a 5 mile run, and something wasn’t right. Four days after that, I was diagnosed with pneumonia. That pretty much put me down for a couple weeks.
Just as I regained my strength, I got morning sickness. That didn’t take me down as completely as pneumonia, but it kept me out of the kitchen for a couple months. One weekend in December, I was finally able to enjoy baking in my kitchen.
The next Monday night I didn’t feel so great after dinner, so I lay on the couch before doing the dishes. A week later, when my mom and sisters came to help me clean my house, that food was still on the stove. How gross is that? I had a painful but generally harmless complication of pregnancy, so I spent most of two weeks in a non-functional state.
The rest of my pregnancy was uncomfortable but uneventful, and I got a bit of organizing and cleaning done with considerable help from my family. Then the kid was born, and every free moment was spent getting sleep, not deep-cleaning the house.
By September, I was mostly functional again, but I had no idea where to start on the house. We had all sorts of new paraphernalia for the baby, I didn’t have any idea how to schedule my days or weeks with such a huge change (from full-time working to staying home with a baby), and all my old cleaning patterns were useless.
What’s a girl to do? I felt like a couch potato who wanted to run a marathon. I needed motivation, a plan, and a schedule. While I’m not the house-keeping equivalent of a marathon runner, I’m probably up to a 5k. Stay tuned for how I’m turning around and getting in housekeeping shape.
