Ya wanna know how to save your family $500 in one fell swoop? Fire your cleaning ladies ($150 every two weeks) and start making lunches for your kids (instead of buying hot lunches at $3.50 a pop).
More to come on the make-your-own-lunches effort because that hasn’t started yet (October 1st is when the magic happens there).
Tomorrow is supposed to be the two-week cleaning lady visit but I called this a.m. and asked them not to come (and used the job take as the fall-guy for why we couldn’t be customers any more).
And now I’m sitting here hyperventilating because I’m not really sure I remember how to clean a house all by myself.
I do know that there are two schools of thought here. The first is that you do a little housework each day and by the end of the week, you’ve run through the list only to start all over again the following week. (I have a friend who subscribes to this school and in fact, she’s the one I heard it from and this is now her biggest fear come true – to see herself highlighted in my blog! Hi, L.C.!!!)
The second school (the one I will be subscribing to – Hi, L.C.!!!) is that you get ‘er done once every two weeks. Kinda like a cleaning lady employed by a working mother.
But where to begin? Should I have some sort of caddy to carry all of my supplies in as I move from room to room? I can tell you right now the supplies will mostly consist of rubber gloves. I’m gonna go broke from all of the rubber gloves I’m gonna hafta buy. I can’t even imagine how the cleaning ladies feel cleaning up after someone else’s barely-human children. It’s MY family making the mess and I can’t even clean a toilet without gagging my way through the whole thing. In fact, I think I need a rubber suit. And what about a harness? So I can carry the vacuum cleaner around on my back. Why were you thinking I needed a harness?? The only question now is whether it goes over the rubber suit – or under?!
But really, the biggest conundrum that presents itself as I take over the housecleaning duties is what to do with the showers. Do I take FOUR showers on cleaning day? How do you clean a shower without actually TAKING a shower?? This seems hard.
Now that I think about it…I’m not sure I EVER knew how to clean a house. Back before I had cleaning ladies, I vaguely recall some sort of debacle with the shower and a can of Scrubbing Bubbles. What I mostly remember was buying the Scrubbing Bubbles just to see what they looked like when they came out of the can. I mean, do the bubbles really smile and scurry around like that?! It gave me the same feeling of anticipation I had when I was a kid and bought those sea-monkey eggs from the back of the comic book. I placed them in the container in the sunlight just as instructed. And I waited. And waited. I was DYING to see those smiley faces on the monkeys. Would a few of them be wearing crowns like in the advertisement?? I never did find out because the family dog, Lady, drank the water before they hatched. But really, were they ever gonna hatch and walk around with smiles on their faces and crowns on their heads?!
Whatta scam. And it’s the exact same way I feel about the bubbles. They don’t smile. They don’t talk. They don’t even say weeeeeee as they go down the drain. And they sure as heck don’t do your cleaning for you!!!
I’m loving the whole stay at home mom thing, but it may be worth it to get a job just so I can have my cleaning ladies back.