Tag: #cleaning

  • A Manic Laundry Monday

    A Manic Laundry Monday

    In case anyone has forgotten, I am a stay at home dad. Though hard to believe, blogging don’t pay the bills, and as such, I take my responsibility as the primary caregiver of my family very serious. Well… Serious enough. I’m not great at this stuff, but I do get the job done.

    And the one jobs I do on the regular is my families laundry. I do lots of laundry, and as the kid keeps getting older and bigger, I am doing more and more laundry. I have started to fear and dread the teenage years, and the amount of clothing that will be coming my way.

    Now, I have only been the stay at home dad for the past five years, but my mastery of all things laundry has been ongoing for eleven. Even before the kid was born, I took care of out clothes. Sometimes I would drop it off at a wash and fold service, sometimes I would get up early on a Sunday morning and take care of it. But for whatever reason, be it through decision or frustration, I became the laundry guy.

    And full honesty, it is my least favorite chore. Cooking, cleaning, doing the finances, going to the school meetings, dropping the kid off/picking her up – all of that I am fine with. Just not the laundry. It’s a thankless task, and no one likes it, and it eats up so much of my time. I try to get it all done on Monday, as no one likes Monday, and I have found that at my local laundromat, Monday is the least busy day.

    But I have started to wonder of late, that I can’t keep this up forever. I have to carry the laundry to the mat, and as I pointed out, each year, more and more clothing gets added to the task. I fear that at some point, the laundry chore will become so big that I will either have to split it up over two days, or I am going to have to beg my landlord to allow us to have a washer/dryer hook up. Not that we have a place for it in this tiny apartment. Surely, I don’t want to be that old man carrying a sack of dirty clothes, or worse yet, have to use a granny cart…

  • Sunday Serenity

    I had a very strange feeling come over me this past Sunday. It wasn’t a special Sunday by any stretch. We did things that we normally did. The wife and I were up at 7:30, and the kid rolled out of her room at 8. We watched Sunday Today, then at 9 we switched over to Sunday Morning. The wife made pancakes, and I walked the dog. We ate breakfast on the couch watching the interview with Liza Minnelli. When Sunday Morning was over, the kid disappeared into her room to play while the wife and I watched the last thirty minutes of This Week, and then at 11 changed over to hate-watch Meet the Press. Then at 11:30, we put a John Coltrane radio playlist on the speakers, while we started to clean the apartment.

    And while I was cleaning the kitchen, this feeling of peacefulness came over me. I felt secure and happy, which is something that I hadn’t felt in a long time. There wasn’t anything magical or profound happening other that the weekly routine that we follow on a Sunday. It was also a feeling of satisfaction.

    If I was being cynical, then I would say that as I have gotten older, my expectations have fallen, and basic and easily completed tasks have taken on an outweighed significance in my life.

    That is possible.

    Or, it could be that family life has become rewarding in its simplicity. Not that I have stopped being ambitious, or striving for a better day, but I think I have enough perspective to see that in my current state, I do have something special and worthwhile.

    Maybe it was the reward of honest work, which has an honest reward in providing a safe, clean home for my family.

    Maybe my attitude toward life has been slowly changing, and only now is it registering.

  • Cleaning Lesson

    We did a big clean this weekend. We cleaned the apartment; every room except the study. My task was to clean the bathroom and the kitchen. My wife took on the role of cleaning our daughter’s room.

    We always debate cleaning the kid’s room. Such as, should we do it and get it in a proper order, or should we take the time to show the kid how to clean her room, then have her do it. Now, she is six, so there is a limit of organizational skill that she has, so we can only expect so much. What we have continued to choose to do is give her room a big clean every month, and then the rest of the time, ask the kid to clean it knowing that she is just shoving things under her bed.

    Now, we have a small apartment, and I think most of you know that, so there is only so much room for so much stuff. If something comes into the apartment, then something has to move out. This is especially true for the kid. We know that starting with October, she will start acquiring things; Halloween things, Thanksgiving things, Christmas things, and then birthday things. And all of these things need to have a place in her room. It’s purge and replace.

    The lesson here is that we need to live with less things. That is what we need to teach the kid, right? Or is the lesson that everything should have a place to live? Or is the lesson we need a bigger place to live?

    Either way, apartment is clean. Well, except for the study.

  • Parenting: Organizing Nature/Nurture

    I’m pretty tired from the weekend, and I didn’t sleep well, come to think of it. (To really “come to think of it” I haven’t slept well in three years.) It was too cold to do things outside this weekend, so we were all stuck in the apartment together. We decided to deep clean the apartment, and finish the ongoing project of organizing the kid’s room. We hung more book shelves in her room, since I can’t stop buying her books, and got lots of bins for the kid to put her toys in. This is all in an effort to make her small space more efficient, and to also make it easier for her to clean up her room. As that seems to be a constant battle; cleaning the room!

    On weekends like this, I start thinking about nature/nurture when it comes to the kid. How will this cleaning, and organizing affect her? Will having a room with white bins of different sizes, labeled, cause her to be an organized person? Will she rebel against organization in adolescence? Will this cause her to flourish in analytical endeavors, or crush her creativity?

    My parents were very organized people; Scheduled and regimented. To this day, at 77, my father keeps a schedule for each day, of things to accomplish. I never felt that my folks pushed “order” on me, but I can clearly say that I rebelled against anything that had any order to it in my teens and twenties. I hated patterns, and well, anything scheduled and consistent. Only when I started my professional career in my 30’s, that this inclination to be orderly and organized became an advantage. Now in my 40’s, I can’t stop organizing and scheduling.

    So, as I look at my kid, I wonder how this will play out, or if it ever plays out; does putting things in a box matter?

  • On Thoughts of Breaking a Plate

    I broke a plate this afternoon. I was putting away the dishes, and I wasn’t paying attention. It slipped out of my hand and crashed onto the floor. The sound of the plate shattering was much louder than I expected. It was almost ear pricing as the sound was in such a high register. The plate broke into a few large pieces, but the majority was made up of tiny shards that went everywhere.

    First, I was angry, as the plate I had broken was one we had received for our wedding, and I don’t think they make them anymore. I started to move to clean it up, but then I stopped.

    I stopped to look at the mess I had made, though by accident; The strange pattern all of the pieces had made. As our kitchen is central in the layout of the apartment, shards had made it to the living room, master bedroom, and even the dining room. The spread was impressive.

    What if I left it? It was a silly question and couldn’t be answered with a, yes, leave it. A child’s bare feet would be home soon. Messes are made to be cleaned up. As are accidents.

    And so, I cleaned the floor. Picked up the large pieces, swept up the tiny ones. Vacuumed the tiles, and then mopped. I would say that it now looked like it never happened, but the clean floors will give away that something happened.

    I was reminded of a question that a history professor posed to us, his class; If there is no evidence of a historical event happening, did it really happen?