Category Archives: Life

The Clean House

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This weekend, I cleaned my house.

Now, to some of you, this might be a regular occurrence.  You might see that mop bucket and mop head more than once a month.  You might even be close friends (or at least good acquaintances) with a Windex, Mr. Clean or Fantastik bottle.  Unless of course you are eco-friendly and use some mixture of water and vinegar — you just might have THAT in your address book.

Cleaning and I have a love/hate relationship.  We are totes mcgotes frenemies.

I love a clean house.  You know that smell that you can smell the moment you walk in your door and it makes you excited about the fact that your house just might be germ-free and guest-presentable now?  I live for that smell.

On the flip side, cleaning my house makes me bat shit crazy and for that, I hate cleaning.  Let me give you an example of why cleaning makes my better judgement jump out of my head and parachute down some slippery slope lined with sentiments of “we’re out of here and off to grab a bottle of Naked Grape, see ya!”

This weekend, I cleaned my house.  I know, I know, I said that already.  But it has great weight in why I am writing this post.  So, I cleaned the house — got the bathrooms cleaned, the extreme amount of toys put away properly, the laundry done and folded AND put away (huge, huge, miracle feat) and I was feeling pretty good about it all.

I felt pretty awesome about my clean house, which by the way I had to do around my thirteen month old daughter who thought me filling up the tub to clean it meant a bath so she continuously threw toys into the semi-filled tub as I attempted to wipe the toilet clean all while “explaining” to her that cleaning products and babies did not mix well together, until I noticed the dishes my husband left in the sink.

Now ladies, you will understand the moment you read that sentence why I bolded that line.  It’s sort of like walking into a grocery store, going into the aisle where the shelf stocker is currently working and letting your two year old run rampant at the end of the aisle the worker started on.  All those nice neat boxes, lined up with OCD precision, will NOT withstand the force that is your two year old leaving the shelf stocker debating between quitting their job or hanging your child up by their pants on a coat hook in the back room.

When my house is clean and I’ve spent FOR ETERNITY cleaning my house, my OCD tends to be at an all-time high.  Naturally, I saw the dishes and I freaked.  I am fairly sure that I began to twitch.

Fast forward a few days later (you all really don’t need to know the details of what happened in between) and I have begun to wonder — what the hell is it about a clean house that makes me so freaking crazy?  I swear to God that I am, on my good days, a fairly calm person who doesn’t mind dirty dishes in the sink but once I’ve cleaned the house, my “other” personality comes out in full force.  I think I might have figured it out.

My life, most days, feels like an endless parade of chaos.  I have so much to do and so much on my to do lists that nothing ever feels accomplished.  Most days, I live with this fact, accept it and move on.  However, when I am cleaning my house, I get this sense of order and of accomplishment and “holy shit I actually DID something with my day instead of going to bed and wondering what the hell did I do all day and why am I so freaking exhausted?”

It’s THAT feeling, the sense of order, that makes me crazy.  When my husband leaves his dirty dishes in the sink, I hone in on it and my tracker beam goes up and I get all, “WARNING WARNING SYSTEMS CAN NOT COMPUTE” and I feel like my brain is blown into bits because the chaos is slipping back in and threatening to become my norm again.

I think if I can ever figure out a way to keep all of the scales of my life balanced — work, home life, family, relationships — perhaps maybe I won’t feel like a nuclear bomb was just dropped into my kitchen sink and the remnants of a chaos-free life are splattered over my face.  Maybe.

Or, and this is probably more likely, maybe I just really am bat shit crazy. ;)

My Crazy, Chaotic Life at Present

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I’m in pure survival mode right now.

I haven’t been able to do vlogs or respond to vlog comments… I haven’t had time to watch my favorite TV shows (except for True Blood because seriously, a girl NEEDS her vamp fix)… I have barely had time to shower.

Why?

Well… I’m crushing it (to borrow a Gary Vee term)…

Not by choice.  Certainly I wouldn’t be running through this insane schedule of wake, work, Willow, work, sleep for three-four hours, wake, work, etc., etc. by CHOICE.  I mean, I did this sort of crazy ass schedule before I had Willow but it’s much different when you want to because you are young and have zero commitments and yada yada versus being older, with a baby and working to reach what feels like an insane goal.

You see… we bought our first house.  Remember when I was FREAKING OUT about the whole bank situation?  Well, I got over it and we found a house we love and the bank approved us and we close on the house in November but…

and yes, there is a GIANT EFFING BUT…

Not only do we need our down payment, which we have saved, but we also need other monies for other things and it totals like a bajillion dollars.  Okay… not really a bajillion but I don’t want to say exactly how much because I don’t want to induce my stress onto you.

Let’s just say that it’s a lot.

So… I’ve been busting my bum working like a crazy fool to attempt to earn all of the money we need to earn prior to closing.  These were mostly unforeseen costs… things we weren’t expecting… so it was shocking but seriously, you can’t go back on your dream house just because this little (I mean FREAKING GIANT) mountain is in front of you… right?!

So yeah.  I’ve been insane.  Which is why I haven’t been making vlogs on my YouTube video. :*(

Once we get through the next two months (TWO MONTHS TODAY – YAY!), I’ll be a more doting and attentive friend… I’ll be a better vlogger… I’ll be NORMAL and SANE and CALM.  Right now I am crazy. ;)

Somehow though, I am keeping it (mostly) together.  I think it’s knowing that we will do it… we will have every penny earned prior to November 8.  It’s the thought process that… well… we don’t really have a choice!!

So, love me anyway while we get through this crazy, chaotic time and if you have any suggestions on where I can find a bajillion dollars quickly, lemme know ;) haha

xo

Sunny Days

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It’s the long weekend and while most people spend it heading out of the city to some glorious waterfront, we left my parent’s waterfront and headed into the city.  Ahh, nothing better than the reflection of the sun off the pavement to give you that nice “I sat in the sun for hours” glow.  Mix the instant heat lamp with Starbucks and it was a perfect urban long weekend day.

As we headed into the city, Steve actually commented on how many vehicles were headed OUT while we were headed IN and all I could think was, “Well darling, they just don’t understand how important it is to eat a waffle loaded with kiwis, strawberries and this liquidy substance called COULIS, do they?” but I instead said nothing because I didn’t want him to think that the only reason I was going into the city was for food.  Better he think that it was for the family time.  Not to mention that he normally orders the waffle so it would be REALLY strange to be fantasizing about HIS food and not mine.

So, we’re sitting at Cora’s and everyone around us is staring at Willow with these little smiles and remarking on how adorable she is and then I get this brilliant idea to let her try some watermelon which she promptly BITES into.  Steve pulled the slice of watermelon away from her face and we realized just how big the piece she bit off was so we both fly into panic mode trying to get the piece of watermelon out of her mouth before she chokes on it while everyone in the restaurant stares.

At this point, the watermelon is making Willow drool ten times more than usual and because Steve had picked her up out of the high chair to get her facing somewhat downward, the drool was flying everywhere and because of the texture, Willow had started to gag slightly and I sat there, panicking, saying, “GET IT OUT! GET IT OUT!”  while sticking my fingers toward her in a hooking motion (as though I could reach into her mouth from where I sat.) We had officially turned into THAT family and when the piece of watermelon flew out of her mouth onto the floor behind Steve, I cheered… which probably made the scene look even more absurd.

There we were.  We both sat there with the unspoken feeling of, “Holy crap, we could have just killed our kid” and we vowed never to let watermelon make contact with our sweet precious baby’s mouth ever again.  I’m pretty sure this is how childhood fears are developed.  I sincerely hope that we don’t give Willow any sort of watermelon complex when she is older.

The rest of the day is fairly uneventful.  We go into Starbucks for a bevvy and to look to see if there are any open houses on a Saturday (there aren’t many, if you are wondering) and Willow nurses herself to sleep in my arms so we sit there for over an hour, texting each other, because we don’t want to wake our cranky wee girl.

Nursing in public is totally cool with me unless I have some dude walk over and sit down beside me RIGHT when I am about to latch Willow on.  It’s hard to be graceful when your kid brings her feet up to your face to push your jaw towards the ceiling before screaming at you because you aren’t whipping the goods out fast enough.  In the end though, we get her latched on and she stays that way for that blissful hour of “Sit on my bum and do nothingness.”

We head back to waterfrontness and decide that it’s high time that we lay out a blanket and enjoy the warmth so we do, except that I lay the blanket on a metropolitan ant colony AND on a hill sloping down toward rocks.  Neither of us want to actually MOVE the blanket so we don’t and we spend the next hour making sure that Willow doesn’t roll down the blanket hill.

Luckily, even though the situation was precarious, she was being particularly adorable so I snapped a few pictures of her and of Steve before we headed back to the house to escape the sun.

Enjoy!