As a crazy busy wife and mom, I must admit that I'm currently really struggling to keep up with our house. I'm not sure what to do about it right now, though, because frankly we're just not home much. We're home long enough to make a mess, but never long enough to clean it. For example, due to our schedules right now, on Mondays through Wednesdays I have a whoppin' approximate 45 minutes of "free" time at home in the evenings before bed. This is the time I am supposed to use for all my cleaning, blog post writing, reading, and attacks on my to-do list. 45 minutes. That's it. Take any more time than that, and I lose sleep. (And trust me, this woman needs her 8 hours.) Tonight I used my 45 minutes to clean up Krew's room a bit, pack up his too-small clothes and winter coats to take to a friend tomorrow, and write this blog post. I sometimes have a free Thursday evening, but we're currently traveling nearly every other weekend, so Thursdays are usually used for packing. Or honestly sometimes I just want to sit and stare blankly at the TV because I've been going nonstop so much already that week. Plus I know that Dave considers watching TV together to be bonding time, so sometimes I slow down to watch some TV on a Thursday for him. Then we're gone Friday through Sunday. And the weekends we're not gone, I'm trying to catch up with all my friends who I have no other time to see. And I'm supposed to keep up with my house?? Um, mission impossible???
ANYWAY, what got me started on this rampage was that today I stumbled across a blog post with a free download of daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly cleaning check lists. They sort of made me feel worse about the state of my house and gave me a bit of a cleaning itch. But they also helped me come to the realization that I've finally reached the point where my expectations for what my house NEEDS to look like are becoming more realistic. I could read the cleaning lists, and calmly accept that I don't have time to do everything on the lists right now (especially not the weekly list), and decide that that's okay. I'm living life and enjoying my husband and son. And that's what's important...not the state of my house. I know that life is going to slow down in a couple months and then I can get the house back under control...but in the meantime I don't want to miss out on precious moments with my family. Sometimes it's so hard to keep those priorities straight!!
You can find the lists at this blog post: http://tidymom.net/2011/annual-cleaning/ and all the posts in the series at this location: http://tidymom.net/tag/countdown-to-cleaning-series/. They are pretty good lists, and are in fun colors, which makes nearly anything more exciting. :)
So fill me in...what's your weekly schedule look like? Do you have time to do all the cleaning you'd like? Do you follow a cleaning schedule or just do everything on the fly? Any tips or tricks to share?
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