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Sunday, November 15, 2009

On cleanliness

Any time I actually buckle down and clean a room, I realize it really doesn't take as long as I have built it up in my head. In fact, if I spent less time farting around the internet, I would probably have a sparkling house and still have enough time to paint my toenails.

My kitchen floors have been grossing me out for weeks. One of the consequences of lactating is not just milk-stained shirts (and thus lots more laundry) but dirty floors when you drip all over them. (Am I grossing anyone else out?) Then those sticky milk drips collect dirt. So I buckled down and cleaned my kitchen today, including the floors, which is probably my least favorite cleaning activity. And you know what? It only took an hour. From top to bottom. Including a good scrub down of the microwave. Now, to be fair, I know have much lower standards than most people (not including my taste in men, DH). But I put it off for weeks and in 1 hour I was able to make my brain at peace.

This was only possible because I have discovered something about my dear child: even though she thinks she's all grown up and doesn't need to sleep during the day, she is wrong. She dropped her afternoon nap about 2 weeks ago, and was thus only getting very short cat naps during the day. And she was also grumpy, which I attributed to some feeding issue. But yesterday I forced her to sleep by placing her in her crib and closing the door, thus shutting her off from stimulation. She fussed a bit, but didn't cry (I'm not a monster). And after about 20 minutes she was asleep (how I love a video monitor).

She is like her father. She will sacrifice sleep if anything remotely interesting is going on (which includes just staring at me). She wants to be part of it all. She wants to stay up late, drinking martinis and talking about boys. She wants to carouse the neighborhood and TP houses. And unless I force her to take some time for herself, she will think she can do it all. I suspect this is a trait that will stay with her for a while.

So the cleaning only happened because I discovered the beauty of forcing her to take an afternoon nap. She is happier, my house is cleaner, and now I even have time to watch the season finale of Mad Men.

1 comment:

  1. We used to clean our house almost weekly. Since kids, we clean it a few times a year if we are lucky, and it's now that we really need it, what with the sticky fingers, sandbox dirt, and milky Cheerios everywhere.

    Someday we will have clean houses again. We'll like having the clean house, but we'll miss the little fingers that made them dirty.

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