Thursday, November 12, 2009

There's poop on the floor...and I'm okay with that.

I'm not a neat freak. I would say that I'm about average in terms of tidiness. I'm about half a dozen steps down from Godliness, if you will. I do get stressed out in an untidy environment, and that usually spurs me into action, but sometimes I'd rather just be stressed out.
And then along comes baby. Yes, I blame the baby. She's a great scapegoat, especially since she cannot yet form the words to defend herself. Before E arrived, I managed to make sure that at the end of each day the dishes were done, dirty clothes were put in the hamper, and the place was tidied of daily clutter. I would keep the floors fairly well swept, the sinks pretty well clean, and once in a while I would commission my wonderful husband to scrub the toilet and push a vacuum around for a bit. As systems go, it worked for us.
Fast forward to present day. I am generally still capable of washing most of the dishes by day's end. There are several key spots in the apartment where clothes are routinely deposited, dirty or otherwise, and neither of those spots is the hamper. If by tidy you mean that I can walk through the apartment with relative ease and minimal risk of tripping on scattered debris, then...no, it's not tidy. J still pushes the vacuum around once in a while. The sinks and toilet? Well, they get attention on special occasions, read: when we get visitors.
Does this make me a bad person? I don't think so. In fact, I believe that I remain average in a new category. Average for people WITH KIDS. Although there are days when I may sink to the bottom of that category as well. Take yesterday, for example...
We use cloth diapers. Before E started on solid food, it was just a matter of throwing the whole diaper, poop and all, in a bag and throwing that bag in the washer on laundry day. Now that she's eating big girl food however, it's a whole new ball of...well, you know. I remove the poopy diaper in the bedroom and bring it to the bathroom where I use a handy sprayer (glorified bidet) to spray the poop into the toilet. Then I bring the diaper back into the bedroom and deposit it into the diaper bag. It's not the best system, I realize, but our bathroom is impossibly small and there isn't room for the diaper bag in there. So, once in a while, we lose a soldier. It's embarrassing to admit that I have poop on my floor, but there it is. Last night, as I was walking through the "dining room" (you would have to see our apartment to understand the quotation marks around "dining room"), I noticed a little...chunk...of what I imagined was composed primarily of sweet potato and banana on the floor. Mercifully, it was on the hardwood, centimeters away from the rug. This the kicker: I actually considered leaving it there. (Buries face in hands in shame.) I was on my way to the shower and just didn't feel like going out of my way to grab the paper towels and do the clean-up. But I did (gasp of relief), and it turned out to be a piece of leaf. So the only damage here is to my psyche, as I realize that what used to be a half a dozen steps is now about 20 or so flights.
Let's face it: I'm walking up an escalator going down.

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