Hi ho, hi ho, it's off to work we go...

Ever try to mop with a 3.5-year-old "helper" and a 17-month-old deep in the throes of separation anxiety? The result is laughable. You know how on some of those "Clean House" shows they sometimes test the dirt level in someone's house? Well if they came in and did a scientific examination of my floors after I was done mopping, I think they would end up laughing at me. Big, deep laughs that would imply that I was oh-so-foolish and that my floors were still oh-so-dirty. "Lady," they would say, "You just pushed the dirt around and added some soap suds on top of it. You shouldn't have even bothered trying."

Well, I do try. But Sabrina adores helping, so she wants to help spray the cleaning solution (made of just vinegar, water, and a couple of drops of dishwashing detergent for that very reason) and use her own little mop while I try to maneuver around her with my own mop. And Nathan follows us around, stepping in the watery mess and crying and wanting me to hold him, which means that I then mop even more ineffectually with only hand and hold him in my other arm. We make our rounds around the wood floors, with the results getting less and less thorough and/or impressive as we go because my determination starts to flag and my frustration starts to rise. In the end, I don't know how much actual cleaning gets done.

I do try to manage a pretty decent cleaning of the house once a week, driven partially out of some deranged sense of what a so-called 'housewife' should do...but the house we are renting is a lovely three-story place, and there's a lot to clean. Not to mention the fact that it is physically impossible to keep a place clean with kids. I mean it. But once a week, I do my best to clean the bathrooms (a very necessary evil), vacuum all the carpets, get all the crumbs swept up, and the floor mopped. We used to have a housecleaner in California, which seems silly now since we only had a small, two-bedroom condo. Now, here we are in this lovely large house, and it's me and the kids, traipsing around lugging a vacuum and mop and all-natural cleaning products so that Sabrina won't poison herself when she helps me clean the toilets.

I should videotape all of this someday. It would be worth a good laugh down the road.