Work, Work.

Those of you that play World of Warcraft will probably understand that reference best, although it applies in this situation in many different ways. I may be a stay at home mom but I feel like I never stop working. Every day I get up, take a shower, get dressed, force the kids out of bed, and make them get dressed, feed them, and then get the boys off to school. After that, I have to clean up after breakfast, start some laundry, and straighten up the living room. I feed all the pets, and then open the house up before I start scrubbing the kitchen. Scrubbing the kitchen is a several times a day job if I don’t want bugs to show up and throw a party in my house. I have to do a daily walkthrough in the front yard to check for weeds and pull any that have popped up overnight. (I live in an HOA that sends us a notice anytime they notice a single weed. It’s pathetic.) After this comes dusting, picking up legos, trying to sort through boxes, (we’re still not completely unpacked from our move in December), and then I try to shuffle bills around.

My point here is that my day may not seem exhausting to other people, but it is exhausting to me. Part of the reason I am forced to clean everyday is what I call, space issues. Currently there are six of us crammed into a three bedroom house. We don’t have much storage space, and I have a total of two drawers in my kitchen for silverware and utensils. You can imagine how little cabinet space I have as well. So anytime I have to pull something out to use it, I end up making a mess of everything else around it. Thus, I am forced to reorganize things when I put items back. I have to put all of my groceries that do not go in the fridge, in the laundry room on the shelf. There are no grocery items in my cabinets except for my spices and they are fighting for space with my glasses. (I think the spices are winning.)

Where was I again? Oh yes, working. Constantly. If I cleaned 24/7 I might have a clean house all the time. And I definitely do try. I get mortified if someone shows up and I have laundry sitting on the couch, waiting to be folded. Yes, the laundry is clean but it’s just sitting there where I have ignored it for the last couple of hours while I busied myself with other things because I despise folding laundry and damnit now it’s all wrinkled and I’m rambling. Yep, I hate folding laundry. I can wash dishes all day. I can wash laundry all day. Just please, please don’t ask me to fold it. I have a perfectly legit reason for hating it, too. It feels weird. Like… the texture of the fabric on my hands feels weird. Don’t get me wrong, I’ll fold the laundry. I ignore it at first, hoping it will gain sentience and put itself away but unfortunately that has yet to happen. So, I’ll put on some Supernatural on Netflix, and then fold it without thinking about it as much as possible. The texture usually only feels weird on my hands if I was washing dishes and then I start folding the laundry. I think it has something to do with my hands getting prune-y in the dishwater.

Other than the laundry, the cleaning and organizing isn’t so bad. It just gets old after awhile. I feel as if that’s all I do, all day. As soon as the boys get home, I have to help with homework, and then fix dinner, and then get them in the shower, and off to bed and then I go back to cleaning cause it’s going to be awful in the morning if I don’t. It is the same routine every day with minor variations to the dance. One day the entire house will be dusty, so I have to dust, otherwise my allergies will get bad and so will D’s. (We’re the only two with asthma so far.) Another day, it will be a laundry day that somehow the laundry snuck up on me and hid somewhere so I had to spend all day folding the awful stuff. Or I have to wash everyone’s blankets and sheets because someone got sick, or it’s just time to clean them again, because people really should wash their sheets and blanket every once in awhile anyway.