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 | of toddlers and time |
I realized this week that lately I have about three toddler-free hours per day. Not all uninterrupted-like, mind you, but bits and pieces over the course of the day that add up to about three hours.
This would be fine if I didn’t have about nine hours of toddler-unfriendly things to do every day.
Loading dishwasher: she climbs in. Getting clothes out of dryer: she climbs in. Folding laundry out of baskets: she climbs in.
Sewing: she grabs the needle (pain for her), she pushes the pedal when I’m threading the needle (pain for me), she grabs the spool of thread while I’m sewing (pain for garment).
Blogging: she types! Writing: see previous!
And then there are things that I’ve been putting off and never coming back to. Such as: we have maybe six tons of old paperwork sitting around waiting to be shredded. Do you know how much space we could free up by doing that? And do you know how long it would take? And how much I’m not going to do it with a toddler “helping”? Yeah.
Last night Dane and I watched The Visitor (yes, I could have been shredding paper but instead I watched a movie—no need to point out my poor judgment there), and there’s a scene where one character walks into a room where another character is washing windows.
“Can you even imagine having time to clean?” I asked.
“I know!” Dane said. “And not just shoveling kid things off the floor—she’s really cleaning! Stuff like windows! Have we ever cleaned our windows?”
“I clean them occasionally.”
“Really? Go you.”
“Maybe a couple of times a year.”
Except as soon as I said that, I realized I haven’t cleaned them even once since Sadie was born. (Though I did clean them the day before, when I also cleaned a bunch of other stuff! But only because of this! Which was a year and a half ago! Go me, indeed!)
On the other hand, she did spend all of today singing “No more monkeys jumping on the bed!” over and over at full volume, so there is at least noise and cuteness to distract from everything else. But the sheer imbalance of time is making me a little antsy.
I visited a friend with brand new twins yesterday. She apologized for her house being a complete wreck. I told her it would be like that for at least five years. She didn’t seem to believe me! It took me that long to be able to get ahead of my daughter’s ability to wreck the house. Sometime in the fifth year the balance switched: she got enough focus to concentrate on making a single mess for a sustained period of time, during which I can run around like an idiot cleaning up all the other messes.
Washing the windows, though. We got new windows put in when my daughter was three or four. They have some handy-dandy feature where they can flip down so they can be cleaned easily. By the time I got around to cleaning them for the first time, I couldn’t remember how to flip them. Of course I couldn’t call the window guy and ask how to do it–then I’d have to admit that I had never cleaned the windows he installed over a year earlier. The special easy-cleaning windows.
Clean windows are overrated.
Yeah, the last time our windows were cleaned was when I brought in a maid service to help clean for my baby shower (10/2007)! And we’ve watched lots of movies instead of shredding paper. We have a tower of it in the living room corner and a bag in the car waiting to go to the place that shreds it for you… I should probably stop there. We may only have 1 toddler, but we figured out that we would actually have to move to another house to get this one clean.
The place that shreds it for you… now there’s an idea…