While dusting our bedroom this week I began to reminisce about our housekeeping journey. You might find this interesting, my struggles keeping our house clean may encourage you, and you may well relate.

I remember cleaning house together the week or so after Franklin and I married. We were in the bathroom and I was “encouraging” a bit of elbow grease around the base of the toilet. Bailey (my son from my first marriage who is now seventeen) turned four the month we married and if you’ve potty trained a boy you know the extra attention the toilet required. Franklin said, “Do you clean like this every week? This is, ‘I’m moving out and I want my deposit back’ kind of cleaning!” Suffice it to say, I did most of the cleaning for the next 18 months.

In the summer of 2001, just 21 weeks into what we believed to be a healthy pregnancy, I was ordered to 24/7 bed rest. I was contracting, was 80% effaced, and was beginning to dilate. Franklin often mentions those four months as being pivotal in his life. We’d lost our first pregnancy together nine months after we married and facing a second loss in our second year of marriage certainly quickened a new maturity. Franklin was responsible for all the cooking, cleaning, and chasing after our five year old.

After Emma’s birth we settled into a new home and a new shared system of house keeping. From 1000 square feet and a family of three to 1900 square feet and a family of four, our world and responsibilities were expanding. We tried to keep the house fairly tidy throughout the week saving the laundry, sweeping, mopping, and dusting for the weekend. If we were in a particularly busy season (report cards or parent teacher conference week, high school musical, Maypole and graduation) the house might go 2 weeks between scrub-downs.

With the birth of our third child came an additional 400 square feet and the busier we were the more Franklin mentioned hiring a housekeeper. As his weekends became an extension of his workweek (with school activities on Saturday and praise and worship responsibilities on Sunday) we often desperately needed a weekend after our “weekend”. Although our house remained fairly tidy and the bathrooms and kitchen floor received weekly attention the rest of the house often had to wait for the afternoon of our 2nd Sunday small group.

Franklin and I traveled to Mexico for two weeks of Spanish immersion the summer of 2010 and enjoyed “home stay” accommodations. Señora Christina had a large, older home in Guanajuato. She employed two cooks and two housekeepers and as we talked about our life in The United States she found it difficult to believe that Franklin and I both worked outside the home without help preparing meals or cleaning. I was envious of her seemly spare time for coffee with friends who came to visit and decided that I would look for a housekeeper when we returned.

We found a fantastic housekeeper who cleaned our home every Friday morning for the following year. We tidied the house on Thursday evenings and Ms. Carmen did the deep cleaning we found increasingly difficult to make time for. She was worth every penny we paid for her service, but our children began to take responsibility for less and less around the house. We adjusted our approach again at the end of that year.

Although our children have chores they do without compensation simply because they are a part of our family, they have chores they are responsible for when we clean the house and we pay our children for their work. We’ve taken Dave Ramsey’s lead on teaching children to work and plan for their money as an important learning experience. We’ve had to very explicitly teach what we expect (what exactly does a “clean” room to look like) and have had to turn a blind eye when the laundry isn’t folded quite “right” but was done to the best of an 11year old’s ability. In the end, “Many hands make light work.”

Before you incorrectly assume that you would find my house spotless if you were to pop over unexpectedly let me confess that our home is often a mess! Particularly this past year…

About the time we’d unpacked all our boxes (see previous posts :)) and were feeling somewhat settled in our new home last fall we noticed a peculiar puddle on our daughter’s floor. Two weeks later we noticed a larger puddle in the same spot. Long story short we’ve had to completely remodel both bathrooms this year, taking the old down to the studs to start from scratch. Our house has been a construction zone more than it’s been a model of cleanliness. In fact, I believe I was recently more embarrassed than I’ve ever been in my life.

I have a fairly new neighborhood friend named Rhonda. I met her initially in August as I had her daughter in my class this year. Although she and I are the same age she is much cooler than I am. She’s very hipster, is my first vegan friend, and effortlessly pulls off fun hair colors and retro eyeglass frames. Lexie and Caden are good friends and we’ve had “exie over for several play dates.

Two weeks ago, Rhonda walked Caden back to our house and her youngest needed to use our “facilities” before returning home. Franklin and I were knee deep in tile cuts and thin set and as I walked Rhonda and Vivienne to our master bath I quite literally wanted to die. I texted her an hour or so later, “Poop stains and all. So sorry. Want to go hide in a hole for a week. Embarrassed!”

Feel free to stop by for coffee, but if I haven’t gotten around to deep cleaning this week, promise not to hold the poop stains against me!