Bathroom

I love my bathroom. Once it was small, blue and mouldy (it has now been transformed into the lovely laundry in yesterday's post). It didn't matter how much you cleaned it, it was still small, blue and mouldy. So I didn't really clean it very much and it was impossible to tell. Then The Man, with much help from the children, knocked down two tiny rooms and made one giant bathroom. It is big, beautiful, sunny and shiny. I love it immensely, but it stops being shiny very quickly and you can see every speck of dirt, dust and toothpaste on its gleaming surfaces. The price of all this shininess is daily bathroom cleaning, and I have worked out a cunning plan.

The first problem is the acres of tiles with no shower screen. I have little interest in scrubbing grout, so every morning after the last shower I dry the floor and walls with an old towel. Then I polish the basins and mirror. Every night after Posy's bath I dry it with another old towel. So most of the bathroom gets cleaned every day and the grout doesn't go mouldy, which is all good. Then every week I just have to spray and wipe and mop, and I nearly always have some short helpers to make the time just fly...

So today, not so much to do. Emptied out the cupboards and threw stuff out, put stuff away, cleaned the windows, got a tall helper to clean the exhaust fans for me, and all done. Then I contemplated my awfully long list of 'Things To Do' whilst thoughtfully eating a large number of chocolates...

Advent Chickens and the Cleaning Frenzy

It has already been established that Posy's parents are evil. Among the many harrowing examples of our unreasonableness is our refusal to provide her with a pet. We are not very good at pets. Over the years we have buried a number of guinea pigs and a cat, and flushed many unfortunate fish. So for the time being, we are petless. Posy is making up for this clear dereliction in parental duty by inventing a number of imaginary pets which have a maximum of annoyance value. Her nine imaginary kittens, for instance, accompany her everywhere. We have to keep the car door open for long enough for them all to hop in, and trip over the nine dishes of kitten dinner in the hallway. Last week she had a naughty monkey pet which told her to climb all over the furniture. Recently though, she has found a real pet, which she has named 'Dead Margaret'. Dead Margaret is a bumblebee which is, well, no longer living. Dead Margaret lives in half a scallop shell, and likes to come to breakfast and for little rides in the car. She is losing limbs in an alarming manner, and I am keeping an eye out for a replacement Dead Margaret, just in case. Still, pet situation not really satisfactory from anyone's point of view.

So today I was charmed to host two baby chickens for the day, along with their ten year old 'mother'. They all ran about on the sun drenched lawn under the pear tree, looking very fetching, and the children managed to avoid running just where the chickens were, which was a relief. Then the children lay on the couch and read, with the chickens having little naps on the children's bellies, then they all ran around again, then at five o'clock the chickens and their devoted human mother went home. What perfect pets! I will be now be starting the Blueday Pet Daycare Service. All the fun, no trauma, no vet fees.

But hey, pets schmets. It's Advent, which this year is all about cleaning of course, what else? I am taking a room every day, and cleaning everything in it. I always end up in a giant organisational whirlwind at Christmas, planning ahead not being my thing. Well, this year, while I may not be more organised, at least there will be no dust bunnies. Well, that is the plan, anyhow. Plus, my clean queen sister-in-law is coming. She is a darling and my dear friend, and has seen our house in all sorts of states, but I thought clean and tidy would be a nice change for her. If I can't quite pull that off I'll just make sure I have all the ingredients for Margharitas on hand...

So, first the laundry, because it is one of the few renovated rooms in the house, and small, so easy to clean. This is it in the five minutes between having teetering piles of folded washing obliterating the sunlight. The poor African violet didn't flower this year. I don't think it saw enough sunshine.

I actually enjoyed cleaning this room this morning. For nine years my washing machine was parked next to the back door, on a ricketty wooden floor, and I sorted the washing on the couch or the bed, and of course, I always got distracted and the washing ended up strewn about the living room, or relocated to the floor at bed time. It was very trying, and now I have much to be grateful for. A laundry bench, and a door that closes. I cleaned along the tops of the cupboards, took everything out of the cupboards, cleaned them, and put things back in, washed and mopped all the surfaces, and even washed both sides of the window. It was very satisfying. I love the view from the window, of sunlit lawn, with children frolicking (with chickens today), my new hanging baskets which will soon be bursting with lettuces and cherry tomatoes, and lots of sky. We have very nice sky here in Tas. Fabulous clouds. I have never seen nicer clouds.

Tomorrow, the bathroom.

The Missing Gene Update

I have been canvassing the opinions of my favourite clean queens, and here are my highly unscientific findings. No-one I have asked actually owns up to liking cleaning. They just say that they hate mess more than they hate cleaning, and also, that they would rather clean little and often than occasionally tackle an enormous mess. They do stuff like wiping down the oven every time they use it, so they never have to face the appallingly charred remains of the hundred baked dinners that I do whenever I open my oven...



Apparently they suffer from an overwhelming urge to remove anything that conflicts with their inner vision of how a space should look. So, toys in the hallway, dust bunnies under the couch, crumbs on the table, they all have to go before inner harmony can be achieved. I have had some fascinating conversations on this subject with friends this week. I am starting to feel like those women in TV ads who are forever popping up over the fence to recommend washing powder to each other. It sounds like such a sad sally thing to do, forever banging on about housework - I feel like I am disgracing the feminist sisterhood. But I also feel like I have to face reality. I am going to spend much of the rest of my life looking after a house, a garden, a family, and I may as well do it with efficiency and as much grace as I can muster. For the last eighteen years my approach to housekeeping has been mainly: if I ignore it, it might go away. Well, call me a slow learner, but eighteen years is probably enough time to disprove that theory.



I love reading vintage housekeeping manuals that instruct women to regard housekeeping as a career worthy of their highest attention and endeavours. I do have very ambivalent feelings about my place in society. My heart tells me that I am doing the best I can possibly do, being at home with my family, and I am very grateful to have that opportunity, but it is sometimes difficult to sustain a sense of the value of what I do while I am cleaning the kitchen (or failing to clean the kitchen). And regarding housekeeping as a career is just not something that the modern girl does - it is the one area of life taken least seriously by nearly everyone. So for me to take it seriously, and to actually devote myself to its mysteries, well, that is still taking me some effort to get my head around. Still, the conversations I have been having recently about cleaning with those of my acquaintance who are actually good at it, have been fun and insightful, so I am considering them in the light of networking, and I am amazed that in the years of knowing them I have never picked the brains of these lovely clean queens to find out exactly how they do what they do so well. So here are the top tips from discussions this week:

Cleaning the oven as above - wiping it down every time you use it. Who would have thought (obviously not me)?

My clean queen neighbour keeps the sink constantly full of hot, soapy water and washes up whenever she uses anything so she almost never has a full sink of dishes to wash.

Another friend with six children has an empty cupboard in the loungeroom that she scoops clutter into when she has visitors, or needs a clutter free space to drink a glass of wine in at the end of the day (she is also disciplined enough to clean it out afterwards...)

A trip out isn't over until the car is emptied and baskets/bags/lunchboxes etc are emptied, and no one is allowed to watch TV or otherwise escape until this is done!

A phone call is an opportunity to tidy, file, or put a load of washing on.

Chores and household projects need to be scheduled into your diary and treated with the same urgency as dental appointments.

Children can be bribed with chocolate/TV or computer time/trips to the park, to do just about any household chore, especially (for young children) if you are doing something alongside them.

Schedule chore free time into every day otherwise available work will chew up all available time.

These are the gems from this week. I am going to incorporate some straightaway and work on others. Let me know if you have some housework gems of your own...

And a last thought. Today at lunch a dear friend was telling me how excited she was about her newly decluttered and cleaned home office, and then we laughed about how tragic it is that these are the highlights of our week, and then we were just grateful that we had each other as a mutual appreciation club. We truly do need the encouragement and support of the domestic sisterhood.

The Missing Gene

It has taken a long time but I have finally worked out why me and mine are all so untidy. We have the wrong genes. I know this sounds suspiciously convenient as an explanation, but bear with me for the reasoning. I have plenty of 'clean queen' friends who are tidy as well as charming, and whose houses all look like they are being photographed every afternoon for Home Beautiful. They seem to be naturally tidy, have married tidy men who like to spend their weekends manicuring the lawn, and give birth to tidy children who come to my house and say things like, 'Did you know there are dirty handprints all over your fridge?' and, 'Why are there toys all over the floor?', not spitefully, you understand, but merely in a helpful spirit of observation and inquiry.

'But how do you know,' I hear you ask, 'that this inclination for tidiness is genetic, and not merely the result of careful training and habitual hard work?' Well, dear reader, it has come to my attention that there are many people who simply cannot abide mess. It makes them nervous and agitated and they cannot sit still until everything in sight is clean. Anything out of place affects them physically, and they can no more walk past a stray object on the floor than fail to stop at a red light. Needless to say, there is no-one living here with any such impulses. For days now I have been walking past a decapitated Barbie head under my wardrobe, vaguely wondering how it got there, and worse, severa days ago Posy came and took the waste paper bin out of my room. 'I need it,' she said solemnly, 'for a project.' I have no idea what she did with it, because it has disappeared completely, but ever since then I have been throwing rubbish on the floor where the bin was, assuming she will bring it back sometime... It was this piece of sluttish behaviour that convinced me once and for all that any state of tidiness I might achieve will only ever be fleeting. I really do have to pay constant attention to stop the house sliding back into a state of entropy. I do appreciate the aesthetic qualities of a clean and pleasant house. It's just that I don't rate them highly compared to about two hundred and fifty six other more interesting things I might be doing instead. So, a cleaning routine approached with academic determination, holding an inner vision of a clean and pleasant home firmly in my mind, and eternal vigilance is my best line of defence against encroaching clutter and appalling filth. I really don't want to end up like the old ladies walled into cottages by piles of newspapers and a lifetime's collection of old clothes and china knick knacks.

But there are consolations. I get to lie on the couch among the glorious confusion that comes on our house by about four in the afternoon. I will be drinking tea and reading 101 Dalmations to the children while the Clean Queens have to vacuum and clean dirty handmarks off the fridge..

Change of Direction Creeps Upon Me...Or Does It?

When I started this blog, I thought it was going to be about homeschooling, and about education and children, the life we make together. Instead, it has become a housekeeping blog, a development I could not foresee, mainly because housekeeping is one of those things that has historically made me start feeling faint and in need of a cup of tea and a lie down. But who can predict where the winds of life will blow? This past year I have reorganised the house and garden, taken up dusting as a hobby, established routines for daily living, thrown out masses of suddenly unappealing junk and even begun to tackle the mending pile. It is all most unlike me, and at times I am a little startled by this mysterious new self, who mops the bathroom floor, and actually gets jobs done before seven in the morning. The other day a friend suggested that maybe it is like the nesting instinct in pregnancy, the desire to have everything prepared for the advent of a new life, and that maybe some new creative project is just around the corner...

Well, at the moment I think 'not toooo creative', and 'please, not just around the corner'. All this organisation is seriously tiring. I have been following (more or less, mostly less) Jitterbug's vintage housekeeping project. The thing is, she is much better at it than I am, and way more consistent. I have been trying to weigh up the comparison. On the one hand, she has a full time job and has to do all her housekeeping after hours. I am at home all day and can housekeep during work hours, but she has a four room apartment and I have a two storey house and a large garden, and she has only herself to keep house for, and I have six people, four of whom are always home and making messes. Plus I homeschool, but two of my children are very useful and help with the cleaning and cooking. All this is just to obscure the essential point - Jitterbug is working tremendously hard and powering along, and I am working harder than I used to, and just hanging on by my fingernails. The whole organisation thing is only ever twenty four hours away from total chaos. This is what has always exasperated me about housework - its incredibly ephemeral nature. Nothing to proudly stand by and say 'Look what I achieved,' because the results disappear almost as soon as they are completed. Perhaps this accounts for the beautiful craft work that women have always historically produced alonside all the housework, the cooking, the childcare. There at least is something concrete, something to say, 'This is me, I walked this way, I left this thing of beauty...'

Of course, the work that we do does have lasting value, but sometimes it doesn't make itself obvious until many years have passed. Happy children growing into fulfilled adults, memories of a happy childhood, children who know where their food comes from, who know how to cook healthy food that makes them happy, a sense of home being a safe place, a warm shelter, a place of peace and beauty. This is what I am aiming for. Sometimes that boils down to cleaning the toilet, spending far too long in the kitchen and attempting to answer damn fool questions with grace and patience for the hundredth time today.

So this blog started out being about homeschooling, and it turns out it is more about deliberately setting out to create a beautiful life. Which is why I started homeschooling in the first place. So welcome to this nice blog about homeschooling....

Spring Cleaning Happens When...

...you walk around in bare feet for the first time in months and you suddenly think, 'hmmmm, could it be that I haven't mopped the kitchen floor since, well, Autumn?' and all the bare-foot-sticky evidence points to the conclusion that, yes, sadly this may actually be the case.

Editing the Spring Garden

Ten years ago when we moved into this house I was four months pregnant with Rosy. I immediately began to dig up the entire front lawn and put in garden beds instead. I have this unfortunate condition that when I am pregnant I think I am Superwoman, and get over-optimistic ideas about what I can achieve with a new baby. The Man thought I was mad, but I was on a mission. I had a Mr Plumbean moment (My house is me and I am it, my house is where I like to be, and it looks like all my dreams), and planted birches, fruit trees, currant bushes, and a rhubarb patch. Mr Plumbean went out and bought an alligator, but I thought that Neighboorhood Watch might have something to say about that, so I merely went out and pinched plants from all my friends, and threw packets of flower seeds around.

Of course, the inevitable happened. Two babies, one on-line business and ten years of homeschooling later, the garden was a fine example of The Cottage-Style Neglected Look. The trees had all flourished, as had the roses and lavenders grown from cuttings In fact the roses were forming their own Sleeping Beauty Castle Hedge along the fence, good for repelling burglars. The love-in-a-mist and forget-me-nots were putting up a brave fight each spring against the encroaching weed tide, nobly abetted by the kiss-me-quick (I never noticed before what Freudian psychoses my choice of flowers hint at...). Last year I felt I really had to do something, so a gardening friend made lovely paths out of the old red chimney bricks we pulled out of the kitchen, and we mulched everything with seaweed on top of cardboard, which took care of most of the weeds. During the Winter I cut off all the rose bushes level with the top of the picket fence so that pedestrians may once again use the footpath.

This year I have decided, in keeping with my general theme, to declutter the garden beds. Instead of self-sown beauties coming up wherever they please, I have weeded and transplanted so that I now have clumps of plants in the style of the English herbaceous border. It is a very cheap, if labour intensive way to renovate the garden. In a few weeks, when Spring proper arrives, I am hoping to see The Cottage Style, Slightly Optimistic of Rescue Look emerging. In the meantime, I will enjoy the tulips, which I mean to move every year, but haven't yet.