I have made more progress cleaning. I’m concentrating on the four rooms the guests will spend the most time in (living room, dining room, kitchen, bathroom), and pretty much ignoring everything else: maybe they’ll want a tour of the whole house and maybe they won’t, but I am working with limited time and even more limited enthusiasm. I am also remembering when I was getting ready to go on my trip with Elizabeth, and I wanted to get all caught up on laundry before we went, and I left all her laundry and my laundry for last so we’d have exactly what we needed for packing—and the washing machine broke right after I’d finished everyone else’s stuff and right before I’d gotten to ours. Most-important stuff FIRST, not LAST, that is the goal now.

One of the best helps is making everyone clean together at the same time. We’ve done it a few times (we’re aiming for once a day until the guests get here), and it’s surprising what a difference it makes. Each person chooses whatever they want to do, but I emphasized ahead of time that we were looking for tasks that made the biggest impact. The littler kids barely have any effect on anything, but they DO make SOME difference, and the two big kids are big helps, and it’s hugely good for morale to have EVERYONE CLEANING and not JUST ME. (It’s something I’d like to keep doing, maybe an hour every Saturday or something, but why don’t I tell you about it AFTER we actually implement such a plan and keep up with it for awhile, instead of when it’s just me assuming Future Me will be happy to do all that work.) We put the radio on loud and it’s not really FUN but it’s satisfying, and things definitely look better when we’re done. The children are starting to say MY lines, things like “Can’t people put things AWAY when they’re done with them?” and “Ug, look at all these PENCILS! They go in the MUG, not ALL OVER THE PLACE!”

Another excellent development: the annual ladybug invasion has begun, which means it will appear that the speckles up high in the corners are from THIS year, rather than still there from last year!

I removed considerable stress by deciding that for the two dinners, we will make our specialties: tacos (me) and pizza (Paul). Those are the only two meals we seem to be able to make in huge quantities AND that the children will eat without complaining and/or acting as if we normally eat only tacos and pizza (“What’s THIS?”—suspiciously looking at carrot shred as if utterly foreign substance). These are not the meals I think of as ideal for (1) company or (2) people in their mid-70s, but so be it. Making something we know how to make (and know how to shop for) will be much, much, much more peaceful from an Inexperienced Hostess point of view—and maybe they will LOVE it and be GLAD it isn’t Company Food. Also, these are both meals we make with child helpers, which makes us AND our children look good. And the tacos are highly customizable, which is nice for guests, and the pizza can be sliced small and I’ll make a salad, in case they go lightly on pizza-like foods. But Paul’s aunt has made several nervous, self-deprecating comments about eating too much, so my hope is that they are plump and love food and will think of tacos/pizza as treats. I still have to decide about desserts.

For lunches, I’m doing what one of my grandmothers did (perhaps the other grandmother did it as well, but I specifically remember it with only one), which is to put out a great abundance of miscellaneous things and let everyone help themselves: three kinds of bread, peanut butter, two kinds of jam, two kinds of deli meat, two kinds of deli cheese, mayo and mustard, cottage cheese, applesauce, grapes, dried cherries, carrot sticks and celery sticks, nuts, sunflower seeds, chips, crackers, cookies. It’s fun, it’s flexible, it lets everyone eat how they want without making me feel like I have to Guess Correctly, and it’s easy to use up whatever’s left over after the guests leave.

Those of you who have instruments that need to be kept humid: how do you keep them humid? The guy who rented us Rob’s cello said we would need to keep the cello in a closed room with a humidifier, and keep maybe even more than one hygrometer in the room to make sure we were getting an accurate reading. He then told us some horror stories: The Family That Thought Two Humidifiers Were Enough, But THEY WERE WRONG! and The Family That Kept Their House at 50% Humidity, But IT WAS NOT ENOUGH!

In researching this a little bit I found there is such a thing as a “case humidifier,” which appears to be…a sponge? in a little plastic box with holes? selling for way, way, way more than I would think a sponge in a little plastic box would cost, but presumably it is a SPECIAL sponge and a SPECIAL box. Or there are other versions, but the gist is that it is something kept inside the case with the cello. It seems like a way better system than humidifying a whole room or whole house—but if it WERE better, it seems as if the cello guy would have mentioned it, so that makes me assume it ISN’T a better system.

********

We watched Nanny McPhee with the kids, and I’d forgotten how much I love that movie.

(image from Amazon.com)

I was completely sure I’d already blogged about it so I was going to link back to that post, but apparently I HAVEN’T blogged about it except for a brief parenthetical in the Wallowing post (a post in which I apparently ran out of steam on the photos). Which is disappointing, because I know I want to rave about it, but I don’t know SPECIFICALLY, so I was hoping I’d already written it. I love Emma Thompson, I love Colin Firth, I love the actors who play the kids, I love the cook and Mrs. Quickly, and the whole thing is just silly and funny and makes me happy.

There! Now I have also thoroughly cleaned the bathroom floor. There were a few areas I’ve found frustrating over the years: I wash them but they don’t LOOK clean. This time, from the dim recesses of a mind that doesn’t tune into cleaning information (“No one TOLD me!”), came this: “In old books, the housemaid is always down on her knees cleaning the floor with a scrub brush. It’s never a wash cloth or a paper towel.” Well, all right then. And the housemaid’s skillz were indeed mad, because the brush took the grungy-looking stuff right off. Right off!

I realize this may seem extremely dim to those of you as skillzed as the housemaid. “Wait. What were you…what were you using BEFORE?,” you may be thinking. I think that people who are good/experienced at something like cleaning can forget what a skill it is, like cooking or using a cell phone: it only seems easy and natural when you’ve had a ton of practice. Like, there are people who can taste some simmering food and say, “Hm, needs celery/garlic/thyme,” or whatever. And there are people who see you squinting with confusion at your phone trying to send an attachment, and they sigh and do it for you. And because I worked at a pharmacy, I finally understand the trinity of doctor-pharmacy-insurance and what error means what.

But maybe my cooking friend can’t figure out how to text someone a photo, and maybe my friend who can text someone a photo thinks that if the insurance won’t cover her prescription it means the pharmacy won’t give it to her, and maybe I can explain to her how that pharmacy stuff works but I didn’t know to use a scrub brush to get grunge out of the floor pattern. We all have our areas of interest and expertise because we can’t ALL master ALL of them or we’d be no use in a post-apocalyptic crisis (“Crud, we ALL understand pharmaceutical insurance but NONE of us knows how to make wine??”).

I just spent an hour cleaning the bathroom walls and the toilet seat, and I had forgotten how similar vigorous cleaning is to exercise, in that I need special clothing for it and afterward I feel GROSS.

I would like to say some appreciative things about this toilet seat. When I bought it, I bought it because it had a child’s potty lid built right in. What I paid no attention to was that the whole seat unit was “easily removable for cleaning.” I have never thought to actually remove it for cleaning, since that seemed like a whole different level of cleaning than I ever do: I don’t really feel the urge to clean place no one sees or touches, considering how many places we DO see and touch are ahead of those on the priority list.

However, today I DID remove the seat, because I wanted to see some information about our toilet which was hidden by the seat, and OMG. It was so extremely pleasant to clean that thing by putting it in the tub and using a giant scrub brush on it. It was so much easier to clean places we CAN see but that are hard to GET at, like around the hinges and around the screws. And while removing a whole toilet seat seemed like it would be a burdensome task, it was seriously easy: move two clasps and pull it right off. It took like 6 seconds, and that included 4 seconds of peering to see if there were instructions. A++++++ would buy this same concept again.

I’m not sure cleaning the walls made a definite enough difference to be worth the time, but I KNOW it’s more worth it than cleaning a sock drawer. Also, we’re in that awkward time period where it’s much too early to clean the regular parts of the kitchen/bathroom for the impending guests, and yet I am almost PANTING at how much cleaning needs to be done. My hope is that it’s like when I clean out under a piece of furniture and it feels like it makes a HUGE difference in the clean feeling of the room, even though that makes no sense because most of the under-furniture can’t even be seen.

It DOES seem to me as if the whole bathroom looks cleaner (I cleaned things like light switches and outlets while I was at it), but perhaps that’s mostly the lemon scent. Also, it quieted some of my cleaning anxiety: I have Made Progress! Next I plan to do the floor. “Next” as in another day: TODAY-next involves a Hershey bar with almonds, and the Shirley Jackson book that distracted me from my Jane Austen study program, and washing my hands a dozen more times to try to remove the smell of rubber gloves.

I had coffee with a friend this morning and feel quite revived and perky. It’s funny how it continues to be a little scary to make such plans, and I continue to feel a little nervous beforehand, but then I have a fun time and when I come home I feel happy and I wonder why I don’t go out more often. (Well, and I wonder why I said so many dumb things. But it gets easier to dismiss those as the friendship gets more established.) Also, I smell delicious from sitting in a coffee/doughnut shop.

********

I continue to be so, so, so happy with my rainbow flatware. At this point I am so converted to it, and to the idea of owning it, that I think I would buy any set of it I encountered, just to Have It. Paul and I each have a monthly allowance, for things only one of us wants and neither of us needs; the flatware fits beautifully into this category. (Paul generally spends his on cool workshop tools that he wants but doesn’t really need for anything; mine tends to accumulate.)

********
I just read Roz Chast’s new book Can’t We Talk About Something More Pleasant?

(image from Amazon.com)

I love love love love Roz Chast books and so do the kids, but this is one I think the kids won’t want to read (yet): it’s a graphic (“graphic” as in “graphic novel,” not as in “graphic violence”) memoir of the aging and decline and death of the author’s parents. It is not cheery, but there are a lot of funny parts. It made me feel kind of sad and scared and stressed about my parents, and also about Paul and me, and also about aging and decline and death in general. I realize I am not selling this. But I felt like it was the good kind of sad/scared: an informative, helpful, thought-provoking sort of book—and also entertaining. I liked it. I said to Paul: “I am not sure there could be a book more fitted to my current interests.”

Before I was ever pregnant, I read a lot of books about pregnancy because I was interested in pregnancy and it was something that was likely to be of even greater interest soon. I tuned into things people said about pregnancy and motherhood: real life people, but also people in movies and books; and I was drawn to novels and movies that involved pregnancy and early motherhood. I got a job at a daycare because I was interested in babies, and I asked the moms about their pregnancies and labors and deliveries. I also watched shows like A Baby Story.

I think a lot of times when people say “No one ever tells you…” or “No one ever talks about…,” the actual situation is that people ARE telling, they ARE talking, but it’s hard to tune into things and/or research things before they apply to us. This is where anxiety and what is commonly (and not very nicely) referred to as “over-thinking” serve me well: because I sometimes think (and/or worry) a lot about things before they happen, I get INTERESTED in those things, so I tune in. I don’t think I ever one single time thought “No one ever tells you…” about pregnancy, childbirth, or early motherhood. Things surprised me a little here and there, of course, and other things took some personal experience before I fully understood them, but it was never that sad, betrayed, lonely feeling as if other people could have warned me but inexplicably chose not to. If anything, I thought things like, “Lots of people say X, but really when it happens it’s not so bad.” Like the weeks of bleeding I knew to expect after childbirth: that sounded awful, but wasn’t a big deal at all. Or I worried quite a bit about being naked or partly naked in front of the delivery staff, but by the time things got to that point I was pleased and amazed to find I didn’t care at all. (This is where the anxiety/over-thinking serves me less well: I can spend a fair amount of time worrying about things that are completely fine and/or don’t happen.)

“Parents/us getting old and dying” is something that is happening and keeps happening and will continue to happen. People ARE talking about it; they ARE writing about it and filming it; they ARE telling us about it. My parents are, I hope, quite a long way from that point; I hope Paul and I are even further away from that point. But I’m interested NOW, ahead of time, so I’m tuning in.

I’m trying to draw the line somewhere sensible. On one end there’s “worrying and fretting about things that might not even happen, might not even be issues, and might not be so bad when they happen.” It reminds me of something Augusten Burroughs said in his book This Is How: he recommends that when you or a loved one is seriously ill, you wait to worry about what COULD happen until it DOES happen, because at that point it will just be What Is, rather than The Scary Unknown. On the other end of the spectrum, there’s going into the situation unprepared and unaware, crying out “NO ONE TOLD ME THIS WOULD HAPPEN! NO ONE TOLD ME I’D HAVE TO DEAL WITH THIS! NO ONE TOLD ME MY PARENTS WOULD GET OLD AND DIE! NO ONE TOLD ME IT WAS $10,000/MONTH FOR ASSISTED LIVING AND INSURANCE MIGHT NOT COVER ANY OF IT!” I’d like to find somewhere in between those extremes: aware in general of a wide range of possibilities, without spending time getting upset about things that haven’t happened and might not.

This is me, throughout my entire life, with every single thing I don’t want to do: “It’ll be easier to do it when X happens.” It’ll be easier to eat well when I’m pregnant, because then I’ll be motivated. It’ll be easier after the baby is born, because I won’t feel so sick and unhappy and be so bothered by smells/tastes. It’ll be easier when I stop nursing so I’ll be less rabidly hungry and can also work on losing weight. It’ll be easier when I’m pregnant again because then I’ll be motivated.

It’ll be easier to trim those shrubs when it’s spring and I know the town will be sending around a truck to pick up debris. It’ll be easier when it’s summer and I can see how the shrubs have grown, and the kids will be home so it won’t be so pleasant to be inside. It’ll be easier in the fall when it’s not so hot and there aren’t so many bugs. It’ll be easier in the spring when these aren’t so LEAFY.

Future Me is so WITH-IT and WILLING! Future Me has a can-do attitude! Future Me is sensible and has self-discipline! When in fact I have always been Regular Me: my room has always been a mess, I’ve always had enough willpower to overcome any diet/exercise plan, and I don’t care about yardwork except insofar as the neighbors care. If a genie were to magic me into a slim, well-exercised body; a clean, well-organized, sparingly-possessioned house; and a tidy, well-landscaped yard, it would all be back to regular before it was time to fill out his one-year follow-up paperwork. I would like to HAVE all these things, but I don’t want to spend the time OR the effort to MAINTAIN them.

Periodically I get into some new plan that is going to help me to do the maintenance as well as the frenzied work, but it doesn’t work because there is a major issue at the heart of things: I don’t want to. It’s not worth it to me. I’ve seen how much effort and time it takes to keep the house clean, and I’m not interested. Of course I’d rather have a clean house! ANYONE would rather have a clean house, that’s like asking, “But wouldn’t you rather drive a Mercedes?” The issue is COST: how much time and work it takes to keep it that way. I can see why it is worth it to other people, because I have other things I spend time on that are worth it to me but not worth it to other people.

This leaves me a bit up a creek, however, when suddenly it IS worth it to me. For example, when houseguests are expected. Our house is a comfortable enough nest for me, but it gets much less comfortable when I imagine it through someone else’s eyes. But, think of the astonishing number of hours it would take to get it clean! And then, I KNOW I’m not going to maintain it, no matter how many decades I’ve spent thinking “I WOULD do it if only it STARTED clean.” So then it is both WORTH IT and NOT WORTH IT, at the same time, and that is hard to cope with, motivation-wise. I become driven only by stress and resentment and fear, and that is not a pleasant way to feel.

I imagine there are a lot of people who say “Piff! Who cares what they think? They can take it or leave it!” This is not a familiar mindset to me. I DO care what they think. To mention psychotherapy for the second time in a week, no amount of “SHOULDN’T care” and “WHY care?” and “DON’T care!” and “Here, take this pill that will help you care less” helped that go away. Some things, I believe, are temperament: just as I’m not someone who feels restless and unhappy in a messy house, I’m someone who cares how other people feel about that same house.

I can ADJUST the caring a bit, however. I can talk myself through it. I can remind myself that I don’t notice the little dusty corners of other people’s spice racks; I can remind myself that I feel nothing but relief when I go to someone else’s house and it’s messy; I can remind myself that people don’t really DEEP-DOWN care very much about my house, even if they DO feel critical and sniffy about it, which many people don’t. But I was thoroughly trained as a child that if you don’t take every single item off every single shelf every single week, it’s NOT CLEAN; and although that training hasn’t made a difference to my everyday life, it turns out to be hardwired when the panic sets in. And then there I am, red-faced, heart pounding, ready to snap the head off of anyone who talks to me or needs anything from me, scrubbing the inside of the cabinet under the sink while piles of books and papers are covering the dining room table, and jackets and mittens are covering the area right inside the door. PRIORITIES, Swistle. PRIORITIES. This is not the time to anger-clean your sock drawer.

Another issue is that I am SO BORED of cleaning this house. SO BORED. Thinking of cleaning that dining room AGAIN makes me want to lock the door behind me and rent someone else’s house for the week. This is when my mind always turns to having someone else do it: if someone is going to have to do something so boring and unpleasant, shouldn’t it be someone who can get PAID for it? But clutter is a bigger issue than cleanliness. And getting someone in here to clean is a bigger wasp nest of anxiety issues than doing it myself, so. “Can’t you just put on some music while you do it?,” says the memory of the psychologist. Er. Do we have different definitions of boredom, or is it that we are affected by music to different degrees? “What’s the big deal, Sisyphus? Just put on some music! That always makes ME feel energized and motivated!”

Well. I am writing this because I need to get started, and I don’t want to. I will feel somewhat better when I DO get started—until everyone comes home and starts to mess up the work I’ve done, at which point I will feel much worse. But I still need to get started.

Since we talked last:

1. By the time I finished writing the post about my Fiesta Flatware Quandary, I felt so panicked about the situation that I picked up my purse and got right into the car and drove 30 minutes to the store without even waiting for the comments/voting. I was nearly panting by the time I arrived. I walked directly to the flatware section and it was not there.

2. OH WAIT THERE IT IS, just moved to a different shelf and lying flat on its back so I couldn’t see it!!! I picked up one box and cuddled it all the way to the register.

3. I spent the rest of the day feeling intensely satisfied about the purchase, especially as the “BUY IT, BUY IT RIGHT NOW, WHY ARE YOU EVEN WASTING TIME ASKING??” comments kept coming in.

4. This morning I woke up wondering if I should have also bought the third set.

5. No, that would have been silly.

6. Well, but.

7. 9:51 a.m., comment from Megan B.: “Go buy what you can because Cambridge Silversmiths has discontinued this pattern and soon you won’t be able to find it anywhere! I sold my final set on Amazon for over $100 because people are having such a hard time finding it now, so RUN and buy all you can now!”

8. 9:52 a.m., purse in hand and on the way to the car.

9. In car: “They won’t have it. Don’t get your hopes up. You were very, very lucky to find even ONE set. The SECOND set was AMAZINGLY lucky. If you don’t find the third set, you still have TWO sets, and that is a LOT of rainbow flatware.”

10. THEY HAVE IT!!!!!!!!!!

11. Take it out and look at it at every traffic light all the way home.

I am in a shopping quandary. Yesterday I found this Fiesta Masquerade flatware:

which I have wanted for literally years, at $40 for a 20-piece set. That is a very good price for this flatware. I bought it and rejoiced. Ever since, I have been petting it and crooning to it and holding it to my cheek (sideways, to avoid danger to the eyes).

Here is the quandary: the store where I found it had two more sets. Do I rush back today to see if they still do, and buy another set? Issues:

1. Forty dollars is a good price for this flatware, but it is still forty dollars.

2. We have enough flatware. We have enough that even with seven of us, it’s not often we run out of utensils. (I think it’s actually BECAUSE there are seven of us: it means the dishwasher gets run pretty often.) We may have to start a second drawer for flatware, and we do not have a generous number of drawers in our kitchen.

3. Four place settings is not enough for our household if I wanted to set the table all rainbowy.

4. I read some reviews online complaining that the little pieces of colored enamel can fall out. This makes me think I won’t be happy with the flatware in the long run and shouldn’t buy more.

5. I read some reviews online complaining that the little pieces of colored enamel can fall out. This makes me think I need replacements on hand because I can no longer live without rainbow utensils.

6. It’s a half-hour drive to go check, and maybe they won’t even have it. (I’m not going to call.) (Really, I know, but I’m not.) (Listen, you and my ex-psychologist both.)

7. When I really love something, I’ve found it’s better to BUY IT UP. Otherwise I later find myself on eBay paying too much.

8. When I really love something, I’ve found it’s better to buy a reasonable quantity. Otherwise I later find myself with huge overstocks of something I used to love and now feel done with.

POLL! We need a POLL!
[yop_poll id=”6″]

Pretty often it happens that I read something about a way to live life (LOSE WEIGHT! ORGANIZE STUFF! BE SUCCESSFUL! BE HAPPY!), and I turn out to disagree with that particular route pretty thoroughly, and yet I end up getting something useful out of it anyway. For example, I read the whole Fly Lady cleaning system, and what I got out of that was:

1. When someone says “Just x minutes!,” it’s never actually just x minutes
2. Having a clean house is not that important to me
3. Bless or oppress?

It’s that third thing that has been the most helpful. I truly dislike the word AND concept of “bless” and so this expression is hard for me to even THINK, let alone SAY, and yet it has been very useful for figuring out what things to get rid of and what things to keep. “Does this item BLESS me or OPPRESS me?,” I think, wincingly, and then I figure out which category the possession falls into.

ANYWAY. I read some books about parenting teenagers, and for the most part I haven’t found that I go back to those books/concepts time and again or that I have revolutionized my parenting because of them—but I did get one major thing from them, which is that if your teenager chooses to engage with you, you should GO WITH IT. The gist of it is that teenagers are reluctant to share things with parents, and in many ways it is GOOD for them to be separating at this time—but that if they DO choose to interact, TAKE IT.

This seems so obvious, or it did to me when I read it. Yes, yes, if my child interacts with me, I should interact back. But then I got to the stage where what my child wanted to interact about was Violent Opinions About Russia, or Some TV Show I’m Not Interested In, and things didn’t click quite so hard. That’s when the book became useful to me: the child is choosing to interact with me, it does not matter WHAT he is choosing to interact about, that interaction is WORTH GRABBING.

This is why right now I am watching the first season of 24, even though it is too scary for me. It is also why I watched this video:

It didn’t appeal to me and it’s not the kind of thing I’d usually watch, but I’m glad that when Rob mentioned it, I immediately watched it. It’s not just that it’s good for the parent-child relationship, it’s also that teenagers find neat stuff.