Streamlining Cleaning

No matter what I do the house ends up getting dirty again. I know, I know, there are five people that live here, of course it's going to get dirty. But I keep trying to come up with some system that will somehow make it stay uncluttered. And no matter how good my intentions are, it never gets that way or even if it did get close, it never stays that way. I think I'm just too lazy.

So I came up with a brilliant idea: in exchange for watching my niece after preschool Monday through Thursday (my sister is going to start teaching full-time in September!) from 1 to about 4, I'm asking my sister to pay for someone to come once a week and clean the house. In fact, in an hour a lady is coming over to give me an estimate.

With our budget so tight, I could never justify paying for someone to clean the house. This last year has been crazy - in addition to DH's medical mystery that managed to steal days, weeks, and sometimes months from us with no warning, I started the year teaching many, many hours a week and by December was back to working full-time. When DH was able to work, he was also working full-time. I couldn't work up enough energy to clean.

When I was a SAHM I still was finding lots of side jobs to bring in some income, in addition to raising my three and watching my niece and nephew full-time. I know other people have it harder than I did and still managed to keep the house clean, but I had a hard time maintaining that.

Right now I am home still recovering from this stupid gallbladder surgery. It has been a full week, so today I am attempting to do a little bit around the house. I'm following FLYlady's advice and am using my timer - working for 10 minutes and then sitting down and taking a break for 10 minutes. Don't get me wrong - my DH has been amazing taking care of me and the kids AND the house this past week, and we've had so many other people bringing us meals, groceries, taking the kids for playdates. The support has been incredible. I've been using this great website to coordinate everything we needed and it has been invaluable. But there's still a lot of stuff you end up seeing while you're stuck in bed or on the couch for awhile, stuff that when you're up and about you end up ignoring, stuff that fades into the background after a while, but now it's driving me crazy! I hope my DH doesn't read that and think I'm at all implying that he has not done a good job around the house because that's NOT at all what I'm saying. I'm just kind of excited to feel well enough to finally get up and do a little bit.

And I'm extremely excited to know that a prospective house cleaner will be coming by soon.

My timer has beeped; Time to get my lazy butt off the couch and moving.