How to Clean your House with Kids

Obviously if it has come to this, you must be desperate and your attempts to hold car washes and bake sales to hire that live-in maid or sisterwife you’ve begged your husband for have failed. You have my deepest sympathy.

Step 1:

Lower your expectations. Your house will probably always smell like peanut butter. And there are no Pinterest boards that match a basket of stuffed animals with your French country décor, I've looked.

I don’t want to brag, but in the past week I’ve earned my Girl Scout merit badge in Good Housekeeping, when everyday my realtor texted requesting showing after showing. I’d answer from within a pillow fort while simultaneously picking crayon flecks out of the carpet and my child’s teeth. Needless to say my house just doesn’t happen to be clean at 3pm on a Tuesday, it takes some serious effort.

Even in the wake of careful planning your filthy dog may still find a way to dig out of the neighbor’s yard and come to your front door in the middle of your open house, while peeing on the welcome mat as a way of welcoming those potential buyers to their new home (true story).

Step 2:

Temporarily hand off your children and dogs to achieve a temporarily clean home. Post pictures of them on social media skipping in meadows or helping the homeless in hopes that someone will offer to take them off your hands for an hour.

Aren't they adorable?

Step 3:

Confuse your kids into thinking that cleaning is the same as going to Disneyland, using high pitched vocal intonations reserved for sorority sleep overs. When that fails, you’d be amazed what your kids will do for gummy bears.

Step 4:

Resolve that threatening to run away to Mexico if you have to pick up the toilet brush one more time is not a real solution. Cleaning is part of your past, present and future. Lastly and most importantly, even if you consider yourself a part of a highly evolved equal partnership, whichever way the cookie crumbles someone will ultimately have to vacuum it up.

My Baby Butler

No one was more surprised than me that we did not win the Powerball. But I got to thinking what I would do if we did. I decided that I would hire a butler, not a nanny, but a butler to do all of the ridiculous and tedious tasks that are required as a mom. Obviously, I’d like my butler to clean my bathrooms and wash baby bottles, but I’d really like to get more creative. This is not about laziness, I exercise 5 days a week, there are simply tasks I wish I could parlay to someone else.

This would be the photo we'd use for our Baby Bulter Want Ad

1). Load and unload my car.

It takes no less than 5 trips back and forth to the car, 10 if I dare go grocery shopping and God help me if one of my children is crying when we pull up. I wish I could grow oct-o-mom arms.

2). Follow me while I walk my dogs to pick up their business.

On the rare occasions that I am able to walk my dogs, when they decide to go, there is nothing more miserable and humbling than cleaning up after them. At the end of the day sometimes it’s the last straw: my poop cup overflowth at the moment.  

3). Fetch me things I’ve left downstairs.

My dream house will most certainly be one story. And it’s never a piece of cake or anything amazing that’s waiting for me on the kitchen counter. It’s always a pacifier or my breast pump.

4). Take out the diaper genies.

It’s not the changing of the diapers that I mind, it’s the compilation of a week’s worth of stink. No matter how strategically I pull it out, I will always get a whiff.

5). Meal times.

My butler would serve as my sous chef/prep cook, with a physic twist, since he would always know which meals were worth cooking because my toddler would always eat everything he chopped up and I prepared. And naturally, I’d never wash a single dish.

6). Stay in the car with my kids when I have to “hop out” for 5 minutes.

This would be life changing, since every time we just need to stop for milk it would appear like we are moving into the grocery store with: my two kids, diaper bag, recyclable bags (come on people if I can remember so can you), and whatever else will fit in a grocery cart.

I wish that parenting was all the good stuff: story time, bath, snuggles and kisses. But it’s a little messier. So until we do hit the Powerball, if you need me, I’ll be the crazy bag mommy at the grocery store, still looking for the aisle where they keep the silver spoons.