Thursday, May 26, 2011

Not Quite A Neat Freak

But I do feel like I am getting closer to becoming one. Maybe it is because my almost 9 month old baby is pretty much crawling, at the very least dragging herself around all over the place, and will put any little speck she sees into her mouth. Maybe it is because I really do like when things are clean and uncluttered....not that 3 people living in a 2 bedroom condo really ever equals uncluttered.

Despite being the daughter of a total neat freak (my mom.....she literally cleans up before the cleaning lady comes each week), I didn't totally inherit the neat freak gene (if that is such a thing). We always had to have our rooms straightened up before the cleaning lady would come when I was younger....something I thought was a waste of time. I mean, what were we paying her for anyway?? I did not marry a neat freak. To be as nice as possible, I would say his cleaning style is.....laid back. He'll help me clean all day long. But let's just say the suggestion to do so (often in the form of strong suggestion) usually comes from me.

I am terrible (ALWAYS have been) about keeping my clothes all neat and straightened up and put away. Case in point....once in college I just slept on the floor of my dorm room because there was such a huge pile of clothes on my bed. We now have a chair in our room that seems to collect my discarded clothes...nothing dirty, of course.....just the rejects that I don't decide to wear or the clean clothes that don't quite make it into the closet. I also seem to change purses a lot and leave the previous one on the dresser or the floor or whatever (you know, for when I change back to it!). I can see four from where I am sitting on my bed as I type this. Ok, so neat maybe isn't the word I am looking for. Clutter might be something that wins against me in my quest to clean my home.

But CLEAN is something that I try very hard to be. The most disgusting thing to me is a dirty bathroom, followed by a dirty kitchen. And now that Sophia is scooting all around, a dirty floor has also made the list. The clutter (aka the rest of the house) will just have to wait.

Let's start in the bathroom. I cannot stand when the shower curtain liner in our shower starts to get that little bit of mildew on the bottom...I don't know if I feel like the mildew can jump onto me or something but when I see it start to collect near the bottom of the liner it is time to replace it. I know you can supposedly bleach them or put them in the washer or something but I can't handle that, it has to be a brand new one. The worst is when you stay at a hotel and you can tell the shower curtain hasn't been changed in years!! Our bathroom is the size of a closet (literally you could sit on the toilet with your feet in the tub and your hands in the sink...I am not exaggerating at all) so I tend to just use clorox wipes to clean the floor and baseboards....it's a task I hate, but for such a small room it gets messy kinda quickly. I guess with two adults showering at least once, sometimes twice a day, plus bathing our baby in that tub, I can sort of see how that could happen. I love when it smells all chemically and clean. Probably not something I should inhale too deeply, haha.

Next, the kitchen. Oh, how I hate to clean the kitchen. There are just so many places to disinfect. The stupid sink and how easily it is stained by whatever gets dumped down it (it is white porcelain....my next house will hopefully not have this) and stove, ugh, the stove. It is one of those flat models and you have to use something special to clean it so it doesn't get all scratched and even water on the eyes of it leaves a black impossible-to-get-off mark. But, the kitchen is where we keep all of our food (duh) and all the bottles for the baby and her little spoons and bowls and letting it get dirty and out of hand is just not an option.

And now the floor. First it has to be swept and then mopped. And yet Sophia can still find the little crumb that was left behind. Ironically, it is probably a crumb of something she tossed of her highchair, but it could be anything. She likes to go for the dust bunnies in the corner so that has to be attended to more often than we used to, that is for sure. Why she can't just sit on her play mat and play with her actual toys, I have no idea. Little tiny specks and various other things tracked around the house must be so much more interesting than the toys we spent money on for her to play with (and to put in her mouth, which is where everything goes these days).

If you can't tell what I was doing all day, I'll sum it up for you....CLEANING! To clarify, I did clean before Sophia came along. It just seemed easier then, not so stressful, like if I missed a spot or didn't scrub so hard it wasn't the end of the world. And I didn't have to clean in the company of a baby who doesn't always like to take a good long nap. I would LOVE to have a cleaning lady come to my house....but then I would probably be too embarrassed by the clutter and would have to clean for a week before she came......well, it looks like I just might've inherited a little part of that neat freak gene after all!!!!!

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