compulsion

Recently I got it in my head that my 100 year old house wasn't clean enough, inspired partly by Kate's question on her blog a few months ago, and then seeing a mouse in our bathroom, and then I read this article in Real Simple last month about what kinds of germs are lurking in your bathroom and next thing I know, I'm soaking my shower head in a grocery bag full of vinegar and dumping baking soda down the sink. Do you guys remember the 80's SNL parody commercial "Compulsion by Calvin Kleen" (based on this one that actually looks like a parody itself) with Phil Hartman? "The world's most indulgent disinfectant." Anyway, if I could find it online I'd post it but if you've seen it I feel like the compulsive cleaner sometimes because I often find myself walking behind Robbie and picking up things he's dropped or wiping up spills, etc. Heaven help my children. But I'm not super worried about that because I learned these clean habits from my mom and I think that my cleanliness obsession has served me really well in life, so, you're welcome in advance, children. The only problem is that though I derive a great amount of satisfaction from cleaning each week, I dread having to do it all over again... each week. I don't know what to do about that.

The other thing I'm compulsive about is everything having a place in our house, so you can imagine that looking at the picture above (taken about two weeks ago) gives me hives. At about 28 weeks pregnant I found myself completely sick of everything in our house and so I started looking for new furniture on Craigslist and creating innovative storage solutions for all of the baby things we have been collecting. The only problem with that is that it meant for about a month, we had two of everything in our living room while I waited for things to be sold on Craigslist and it was hard to get around especially since I don't fit in awkwardly small spaces anymore. Fortunately, it has gotten much better—we finally sold the love seat and extra dining set (the biggest space consumers), and I've more or less found a better place for everything else to be stored. Overall, I'm pretty pleased.

Now I'm looking back at what I've written and I'm a little embarrassed that these are the thoughts and activities that fill my days. Soon enough there will at least be baby photos to accompany them so I guess you have that to look forward to.