Keeping house with a toddler who still puts things in his mouth about is a bit of a challenge. No cleaning fluids really come out while he’s awake, which means after bed time is bathrooms and floors right now.
And tidying is a challenge as Noah loves to dump things out – put any two objects in a larger one and that is an open invitation to turn the larger container upside down! On the plus side though he also loves to help and actually is getting – well – helpful. He can bring a cloth or put the shoes vaguely where they go.
What is it about toys though? They multiply dreadfully by the hour, it seems – and I can’t really figure out where they all come from. I don’t buy Noah stuff when we’re out, usually. He hasn’t had a birthday recently and Christmas is receding quickly. I haven’t ordered anything from eBay. And yet the toys, they appear. At the auto show he got a hot wheels type car from Ford and suddenly his male relatives managed to produce 4 more of them. We have 5 dolls now, largely due to my complaining about lack of boy dolls (so now when people have run into boy dolls they have brought one in). We got a bin of second-hand stuff from a friend.
I find myself oddly reluctant to completely declutter the toys, too. I pick out the obviously wrecked ones and recently I put a box of truly baby toys away in a closet, and then I rotate the ones we have around. But why can’t I just pass on a decent truck toy to someone else when we have two equally decent ones? Part of it’s sentimentality, and part of it’s fear that Noah will want that one. But there’s some other strange mechanism at play that I haven’t quite figured out yet, some concept of toys as things you keep.
Of course looking at what comes out of my parents’ attic, I can guess where some of that comes from.
Also because the kitchen is in constant activity. Snacks, drinks, pot-banging, water-play, and crafts all take their daily toll and by the end of the day it often looks like a bomb went off. Add in to that that I’m trying to make most things from scratch and use real vegetables (the kind that come with dirt, peels, and non-edible bits) and some days it seems a bit Sysiphean.
The house seems a couple of rooms too big for the amount of time I really have to clean it. The workshop is a dreadful, dreadful mess, and Carl’s office stands between me and the hidden kitchen, so those three rooms are just write-offs. If I had an extra day in the week I’d get to them but as it stands I just guiltily run in to dust/vaccuum now and then and every time my MIL comes down I think “okay, while she’s here to watch Noah I will sort those out” and never do. It may have to wait.
On the plus side of the ledger, if I hadn’t discovered FlyLady before kids, I would be so screwed. But luckily I did and so the rest is pretty manageable – swishing and swiping happens, clutter is generally tossed, the bills are paid and filed, the laundry is done, and generally things are decent enough (especially if you can ignore the fact that play food is strewn from one end of the living room to another).
And, and, and.
I am sick of it.
Truly sick of it. I can’t find my zen in it much anymore, except the odd moment at 10:30 pm when I look at the washed floor and the empty dishrack and then, yes, I feel that peace with my environment that I had so enjoyed the last couple of years. But during the day when I am cleaning up the sunflower seeds Noah spilled or wiping the nth milk drop off the floor? No. The pleasure in it is largely gone and I find myself actually starting to deeply understand the feminist movement of the 60s.
I figure that some balance will come back at some point, but right now it’s really not balanced
I’d like to change that.
