Mr. Clean

I mean, Mr. A. It seems as though he is going through his own little nesting phase.

On Sunday after lunch, he went to use the downstairs bathroom and came right back out again, visibly distraught that the toilet seat had some specks of discoloration on it.

It was so "disgusting" that he picked up his keys immediately and went straight to the store to get rubber gloves and a bottle of clorox. And then spent 2 hours cleaning only the toilet area of the half bathroom, including behind and under the toilet and IN THE TOILET TANK, including another trip to the home improvement store to get a new toilet seat because he declared the existing one unsalvageable.

Now let's back up a little.

First of all, I promise there was no epidemic of black mold infesting the toilet seat. Which you may have thought there was, based on his reaction to it.

I do my absolute best to keep up with the household cleaning, although I admit I would rather bake you brownies or make pasta from scratch or do ANY cooking before I would like to dust the baseboards. AND I use natural cleaning products that I do think are effective, but let's face it, they're not bleach. (Although I do use clorox's disposable head toilet bowl cleaners...)

But of course the time between bathroom cleanings is probably a tad longer than exactly desirable, even though I definitely clean them before it gets dangerous or completely gross. I promise. But even when I do clean the bathrooms, I don't normally scrub behind the toilet. Do you? I am I a worse housekeeper than I thought??

So I do my best to clean up here and there, including swiffering before all the dog hair on the wood floors makes it look like we have carpet, and wiping down the sinks and toilets and showers on a fairly regular basis. And I keep the kitchen pretty sparkly, although the microwave is another story, and I don't always shake out the toaster crumbs.

But when Mr. A gets a bee in his bonnet about cleaning, you better watch out. The last time he cleaned the kitchen, he took the knobs off the stovetop and cleaned them and behind them. And then with the recent cleaning of the toilet that involved a whole new seat.....

So he has come to the conclusion that we need to hire someone to come clean our house once a week.

*I hang my head in shame*

I can't tell you how ineffective this makes me feel. He says I shouldn't take it personally, but I am feeling this suggestion of his very personally.

I work from home, for pete's sake! Why can't I handle this in an acceptable manner? I mean, why can't I just keep this place spic-and-span with a few minutes of cleaning per day?

He says that that is the point. I do work, full time, from home, and while maybe I keep "up" with the cleaning by doing a little here and there, the house isn't regularly fully and thoroughly cleaned. He says not to worry about it- my time is more valuable working than cleaning anyway, and I shouldn't feel bad about it. His mom had a cleaning service, after all.

But I guess that doesn't make me feel any better. His mom is not a domestic example in any sort of manner- no wonder she didn't want to clean her house! She didn't want to make things from scratch, either!

My mom never had to hire anyone. (Huge caveat, she was a stay at home mom. And she had four kids "who needed to learn how to clean". Haha.)

Mr. A says that if I didn't have a job, and my responsibilities were solely HOME related, maybe it would be different. So I said, well, whenever the baby comes, I will be off for several months, so I will be sort of a stay at home mom then. His response was that I will be caring for a newborn and two dogs, and that he thinks that that will be plenty without having me feel like I need to deep clean the house once a week. He said it is amazing that I do all the cooking that I do and all the laundry, too.

So tomorrow, we are getting an estimate on how much someone would charge to come in once a week. It's a huge blow to my domestic diva ego. But maybe it will be nice to not have to worry about it.

Oh, and by the way, Mr. A also declared that our kitchen trash can was also too dirty for existence. Yes, the trashcan! So now we have a spotless new white one. This baby is going to make our house the cleanest place on the planet!!