On Having House Help

I have watched the cleaning lady and thought about how much I will miss daily housecleaning back in America.  Then we moved to a house with only sporadic cleaning, and it's not that bad.  Yes, the bathroom isn't as tidy as when it was cleaned every single day, but does it really matter?  Not too much.  We are surviving with some gunk on the back of the toilet between ordinary-mom cleanings.  And the floor?  It's nice how it shines when it's mopped every day.  But it's not really that much trouble to sweep and looks almost as nice.  The real work is picking everything up off the floor and putting it away, and I have never yet found any cleaning help who puts any effort into putting things where they actually belong, so it really takes almost as much work to re-put things away as it would to just tidy the room in the first place.  And I actually kind of like mopping and seeing the floor all shiney, although I'm not going to end up doing it every single day.  So we've gone from daily housecleaning to barely housecleaning, and it's not really a sacrifice.

But the one thing I will miss is having the dishes washed for me.  Once the kids are finally in bed, I just have to put dinner in the fridge and pile the dishes up.  In this house I take the tub to the outside sink and leave it there.  No mess, no stink, no ants; the next day the dirtiness magically disappears.  I don't really mind washing dishes, but it's really nice to not have to do that chore at the end of the day.  I can push myself through clearing and wiping the table when I know I don't actually have to wash the dishes.  So I'm really going to miss that when I go back to expensive-cleaning-people land.


That's what I've been thinking for a while.  Appreciating having house help to wash the dishes for me.

Then suddenly I had an epiphany: in America, we have MACHINES.  Called dishwashers.  And you clear the table and pile the dishes up inside the machine, and there are no ants and your dishes are magically clean in the morning.


I've been gone too long.