Skip to main content

Household Administration Duties & Ants, Ants, Ants

This image is taken from this amazing article on SheKnows.com

I am the all-powerful Oz of our household. I am the administrator, family wellness and health coordinator and master of service providers.

Before baby, when I was working full-time and not breastfeeding, my husband and I split everything as 50/50 as possible. Nonetheless, we still fell into some pretty traditional habits. Hubby and I have very different standards when it comes to household cleanliness, so I've always taken on more of the domestic stuff. He is the breadwinner, always drives, always pays, opens doors and does other gentlemanly things. We used to eat out or order in most of the time, so I didn't cook a lot. He grilled about as often as I cooked. When something happened, like a leaky faucet or bug problem, we'd call the landlord. If it took a couple of days, we were both at work all the time and so it didn't matter much anyway.

But now that we have a baby, and she and I are home all the time, there are so many things that must be done to keep our house in order. For example, in our current townhouse, there is a smoke/CO2 detector in the kitchen. It kept going off every time we turned on the oven. So we took the batteries out, naturally. If it were still just us, we'd probably leave it that way for the rest of our lease. But thanks to baby cakes, instead I called the gas company to get a technician out here to test the toxicity of the air in the kitchen and house. He found no gas leaks and all chemical levels were well below normal. He said that our smoke detector kept going off because it's too close to the oven, and, in fact, it's placement is unusual. We let the landlords know, and they were no help. They suggested we open the window when we cook... We got a new smoke detector and it's not located as close to the oven. And I cook with the window open for good measure.

About 2 months ago, I woke up earlier than the baby. Hallejua! I planned to make myself a cup of coffee and read a magazine. I walked into the kitchen to find what looked like the stove top moving... Ack. The stove top was covered in ants. Like a blanket of moving ants.

I opened up the kitchen windows, the door leading from the kitchen to the garage and the garage door and sprayed the hell out of the stove top and surrounding cabinets. I then got to work disposing of the bodies - what seemed like millions of ant corpses. I had just enough time to change my clothes and wash up afterward before baby girl woke up. So much for a little me time.

Around the same time as the kitchen ant-scapade, I started this post. I was in the midst of a mail merge so I could print address labels for our Christmas cards and I giggled to myself, noting how strange it is to use my Microsoft Office skills at home. Before going to the post office to drop off our family Christmas cards, I took a quick look around and decided the weekly cleaning service we're paying for is too expensive for what we're getting. So I called and requested a service cancelation. At the same time, our part-time nanny texts me to let me know she's sick and can't make it in at all that day... How is it I found myself dealing with staffing issues at home?

A word on mommyhood: grind.

But without the luxury of 9-5.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Participation Trophy Woes

The image is taken from this article .  I'm a millennial, but an older one. I was born in 1984 which I believe is the beginning point of the millennial generation. I want to talk about a specific aspect of growing up millennial: participation trophies. These were somewhat regular in my childhood. Although they were not always guaranteed, they were around enough to matter in critical times during my development. I had some participation trophies, while I also had some other earned trophies. However, those participation trophies had an impact on the "earned" trophies. For me getting participation trophies taught me to devalue all trophies. When I was a junior or senior in high school, my mom found several awards I'd won shoved in a drawer in my bedroom. One such trophy was a writing award, another was my "Rookie of the Year" plaque I'd earned for diving into the Youth & Government program gung-ho even though it was my first year. I'd just jo

Deplin

Some may be surprised that I decided to write about this. It's personal stuff. But after a lot of thought, I decided to share anyway because I found something really beneficial to my health. Anyone who knows me really well knows that I have struggled with anxiety and depression at different times throughout my life. Anyone who sort of knows me has probably heard me talk about this and been surprised. You may fall into that second category now. I'm naturally a fairly nervous person. What may seem very small and insignificant things to some can send me into a tailspin. I may worry over a mistake on a work project or something stupid I said at a party for weeks after the incident. I get stomach aches when this happens. I give just as much attention to worrying about the future as I do the past, and it results in even more stomach aches. In my late twenties, I was pretty sick of feeling sick to my stomach from all this worrying all the time. So I started seeing a therapis

The Liebster Award

Thank you so much, Tasha Giacometto of TryAllMama.com for the Liebster award nomination! I'm excited about this opportunity to share more about myself and promote other awesome bloggers. The Liebster award is an award given to bloggers by other bloggers! It has German origins and has several definitions: dearest, lovely, pleasant, and valued, among many others. This award is a great way to make connections with fellow bloggers, and support new blogs or blogs with less than 1,000 followers! THE OFFICIAL RULES OF THE LIEBSTER AWARD Thank the person who nominated you, and post a link to their blog on your blog. Display the award on your blog — by including it in your post and/or displaying it using a “widget” or a “gadget”. (Note that the best way to do this is to save the image to your own computer and then upload it to your blog post.) Answer 11 questions from the Blogger that nominated you. Provide 10 random facts about yourself. Ask your nominees to answer 11 questi