twinutero

I don’t consider myself a clean-freak… or a neatnik… or even particularly tidy, although I do have the occasional manic organizing binge. I’ve lived in small, rented, student-style apartments for too much of my adult life to have developed a robust housekeeping ethic.

Now that I co-own a house and have three toddlers, however, I feel more motivation and more responsibility to keep our home decent, if not sparkling.

It will never be sparkling. Here’s why:

• The kids are perfecting their demolition skills, and the wreckage can be startling at times. “Looks like a grenade went off,” one visitor remarked. It’s challenging enough just to keep up. Thomas is learning to put his toys away and with prompting and supervision and more prompting, he will do it. The twins see order as opportunity.

• We live in a hundred-year-old house that we bought in unlivable condition six months before our first son was born. Clever entrepreneurship or complete naivety, we’re not sure. In any case, we’re still renovating.

• Renovations aside, there’s always an easy distraction from housekeeping. When the kids are awake, I’d rather spend time with them than scrubbing the toilet. When the kids are asleep, I’d rather spend time with my husband, or write, read, sleep. Just about anything but clean. And besides, as my cousin once said, “Who wants to be remembered for having a clean toilet?”

Consequently, we sort of muddle through the housekeeping. There is no routine or schedule. Things generally get done when impulse, chance and a fair amount of debris coincide. It’s easier now that one of us can comfortably (well, reasonably) look after all three kids. That frees either me or my husband to do chores. When I am on my own with the kids and have a break, I sometimes set the stove timer. Twenty minutes for chores; the rest of the time for me. Really, this daily balancing act can make you crazy….

I recently found some advice, inspiration even, in a book by Ellen Sandbeck called Organic Housekeeping. While it’s probably unhealthy to get too excited over a book on housekeeping, it’s definitely unhealthy to sterilize and perfume your house with toxic cleansers, especially if you have young children. Sandbeck devotes a chapter to the kitchen, bath and bedroom, as well as laundry, car, garden, and pet care, and a small section on baby-proofing. She meticulously describes how to clean using natural products, and organize your house so that you spend less time cleaning. Not a page-turner, perhaps, but entirely useful when time is limited and safety is a priority.