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Kid and Caboodle: Musings of a "Split-Shift" Mom  I am always amazed by people who take annual "spring cleaning" seriously and wash everything from their rugs to their drapes. With an active 3-year-old about the house, I'm lucky if I can keep any horizontal surface -- the couch, the coffee table, the kitchen counter, the floor -- clear of toys for more than an hour. The only time I can see the top of the dining room table is just after my monthly potluck parties; I sometimes joke that the reason I have people over is to motivate me to clean the house as much as to socialize! During the rest of the month, housecleaning consists of trying to keep up with the basics; my husband and I run the dishwasher when it gets full, empty trash cans when they are about to burst, do laundry when we are running out of clothes, and wash and vacuum surfaces whenever there is a spill. Anything else more elaborate -- such as dusting, sweeping, or organizing shelves -- has to wait until a professional cleaning crew can go through the house! This minimalist attitude toward housework is very different from how I behaved when I first brought my son home from the hospital. For the first few days he was home, I went through a frenzy of housecleaning; not only did I clean the bathrooms (including the shower curtains and bath rugs), the dining room, and the kitchen countertops, but I also wiped down all the shelves in the refrigerator, rearranged everything in the freezer, removed spiderwebs from the ceilings, and dusted all the curio tables. I think I was worried that if the house wasn't spotless my newborn son would become ill. Fortunately my anxiety lessened after a few weeks and the house returned to its generally cluttered (but fairly clean) state. These days I think part of the clutter problem is sentimentality. I don't know whether or not my husband and I will have another child, so I have saved all of our son's baby clothes, toys and feeding equipment as well as my maternity clothes and nursing tops. We also have lots of things we don't use but seem too good to relegate to a landfill, like a TV so old it doesn't have a remote control, a combination phone-alarm clock-radio with a loose connection, old computer screens, a raggedy sofabed, and boxes of clothes over 20 years old. Perhaps in May, when my husband completes his graduate degree, and thus theoretically has more free time, we will go through all the things taking up space in our home and have the first "spring cleaning" since we moved in 10 years ago. |
