Hello! In case it wasn't clear, I ended up taking a three day weekend. It was lovely. But I wasn't idle the whole time. I spent a lot of time thinking about, researching and actually making progress on keeping a clean house.

I know. Not the sexiest topic, on any day. But one that's for sure come to a head. I talked about how much I yearned for cleanliness whilst in the throes of nesting, and pregnancy hormones definitely exacerbated the situation. But in general, I feel better when things are clean and organized. I'm not the cleanest of all my friends, but I'm on the cleaner side of the spectrum, and when things get too out of hand (for me) I start to feel sort of itchy, and at some point overwhelmed and almost panicky. Which is not to say I suffer from OCD or another mental health issue, and I often make the conscious choice to spend my time doing something other than clean, because as much as I like to have things tidy, there are things that are more important to me.

There're two. Since Wesley was born, a mere 17 days ago, I have been thinking a lot about how best to manage the house. A lot of my friends hire cleaning services, and not one of them regrets that choice. I was a bit hesitant - mostly, I think rooted in the fact that I'm currently a stay at home mom, and it feels like I'm somehow shirking my end of the deal to not clean the house. I don't really believe that, for myself or others, but in the constant struggle to figure out the best way to organize our family, I sometimes justify my staying at home-ness as one of managing the entire household. Outsourcing some of that requires me to rethink things.

But - rethink things I did. When you have a four-year-old and then have a newborn, you are acutely aware of just how fast time goes, and how - pardon the cliched sappiness here - precious this time really is. I want to sit here and stare at my baby, and when I'm not doing that, i want to do yoga and make good food and work on this blog. Not scrub toilets.

So, in what my closer confederates will understand is a big leap for me, I did a little research on cleaning services. I came up with one that's eco-friendly, classifies its workers as employees, pays them well, and respects their time, scheduling-wise, and gets insanely good reviews. So I got a quote. This particular service has to do a "deep clean" before it will start doing weekly or bi-weekly services, so I got quotes for the deep clean and bi-weekly visits. The deep clean came in at between $1,000 and $1,200, and the bi-weekly was $175.

Now I understood why their website exhorted clients to adequately value their own time when considering investing in a service. I think I value my time just fine - more so than ever now that it's monopolized and dictated by one very hungry caterpillar - but that was a lot of money. I didn't give up there, and checked out one or two others, but all were expensive and going to take a long time to schedule. And look - if I was going to pay $1,000 to have someone clean my house, you better believe I'd let it get dirty. I might truck in some dirt just to be sure I got my money's worth. But that might come at the expense of my sanity. So.

I decided I needed to give cleaning my own house another go. But I thought it was time to try something new. People tend to fall into one of two camps when it comes to housecleaning - those who do a little every day, and those who do it all weekly or monthly. I've always been a clean-it-all-on-one-day kinda gal. But that means that you have to devote a whole day, and if you miss a day, because, say, your child has decided he has to eat every 15 minutes, then the whole house can start to feel overgrown pretty fast. So, I'm going to try a schedule. I looked at a bunch on Pinterest and decided to give it a go, with the following thoughts in mind.

1. I don't want to have a daily task list that makes it seem like all I ever do is clean. This one, for example, freaked me out (though I'm sure it would work really well for some).

2. I want to have a schedule but learn to let it go if I miss a day - then I'll just get to it the following week. And if it's only one task/room, hopefully missing a week won't seem as dire as it does if you miss a week or two in whole-house cleaning. I really like this take.

3. I'm starting with just a weekly schedule, but if it works, I may import it into a longer time frame like this monthly schedule.

I really have to go - Wesley calls - but a final note: I'm not mentioning my spouse, my four-year-old or my sister (who's going to live with us this summer - Yay!) here, but they are all part of the solution. (And the problem. But also the solution). Another post another day on how we try to tackle this all as a team - and how the schedule is working out! If you have tips on how you do the daily clean thing, please share. Holla at ya later.