Brooms and Phones

Little kids create this chaos of mess that you then spend all day cleaning up. When I stay home with the kids on Wednesdays, I usually end up vacuuming or sweeping the dining room floor 3 times a day. I do dishes 3 or 4 times a day. I cook dinner, and most Wednesdays I try to bake as well. Yesterday it was lemon poppy seed scones.

My other goals for Wednesday are laundry, take the kids on an outing, and do a non-standard cleaning task on top of the normal daily cleaning tasks (dishes, counters, sweeping, vacuuming, make beds being the normal ones). So yesterday I got on my hands and knees and cleaned the wood floors with a cloth and vinegar; this was inspired by the fact that I'd let Milo wear his brand-new shoes in the house, and now I know what non-marking sole means (his soles made marks).

Pretty much every evening we clean and do laundry. And rest assured our house is far from pristine. Neither of us likes a lot of clutter, so you won't find big piles lying around, but still, it's like we live in a constant state of mild chaos. Before I had kids I never knew that housework could be so time consuming!

I am not comfortable with the idea of having a cleaning person or a cleaning service, so that's not an option we'll use.

I actually more or less enjoy all of these tasks, as restoring order to our little house gives me pleasure. They're time consuming and tiring, but satisfying. One thing I was thinking about was the technology we have available to assist with domestic tasks. The tools I use to cook and clean are pretty much the same tools my grandmothers used when they were raising their kids. I hang my laundry as they did, I use a broom as they did, I get down on my hands and knees to scrub the floors as they did. I chop vegetables as they did, I cook rice in a pan as they did. It doesn't seem like technology has changed the domestic sphere all that much.

What has changed in domestic technology? Stuff that's typically coded more male than female; audio technology, television technology, movie watching, computers, and phones. The way we watch movies now and the way I communicate on my fancy phones and computers are all beyond what my grandmothers could have imagined. When it comes to toys and entertainment, when it comes to stuff that helps us do our work, technology has changed everything. But when it comes to how we clean our houses, the tools are more or less the same.

It's kind of funny to imagine a futuristic world that my own grandchildren might be living in, one in which they'll be flying around with their jet packs and communicating to each other via the chips implanted in their brains, but when it comes time to clean up the crumbs from lunch, they'll still be breaking out the broom and dust pan.