Domestic Goddess in Training

Ha. That title makes me laugh.  Inwardly. Cynically.

I grew up in a home that was virtually spotless all the time.  I find myself expecting the same standard in my own home, but it just isn’t going to happen. I need to face this.  I haven’t gone back to work yet, and I have a nearly 9 month old baby, and I still haven’t figured out how to juggle the housework with the cooking and the baby-raising and actually dressing myself.  I can only imagine what will happen when I go back to work.

The original plan was to hire a cleaning lady (I like to keep things gender neutral, but I’m afraid I’ve never heard of a cleaning gentleman for some reason) when I go back to work.  But now that my husband is likely going to stay home with our son when I go back to work, since we still haven’t gotten a spot in a day care, we can’t justify it.  And while my husband does try, I can’t imagine he’ll be able to tackle the domestic god thing when I couldn’t even get it down myself.

Our house isn’t a *total* sty.  We’ve mastered the art of doing the bare minimum of cleaning in the main living areas so when people come over they think we’re actually keeping things fairly in order.  And now that we have a little boy who gets into just about everything he can, I am painfully aware of every crumb and bit of junk on the rug, all of which he will stick into his mouth if given the chance.  How do people do this???  I have lamented about this before, and Jen has too.  I know this is a common problem.  I also know it won’t last forever.  But until we have two incomes again, we can’t afford or justify hiring someone else to do what we feel we should do ourselves.

I tried coming up with a clever schedule – instead of cleaning the entire house in one day, as we used to do, why not do a couple of chores each day?  That way it is never more than 15-30 minutes of cleaning in a day – and that’s manageable, right?  But we kept to that schedule for two whopping weeks before we dropped the ball.  Now we vacuum maybe once or twice a month.  Dusting? Ha.  I try to clean the toilets at least every other week.  Everything else is incredibly irregular and only gets done when it’s either getting completely disgusting and unliveable, or people are coming over.

Perhaps the solution is to start throwing dinner parties on a regular basis.  That would force us to clean.

Help!