Why I'm Failing at Life: Domestic Duties I Will Suck at Forever

1. Keeping every room of my house clean at the same time. And I'm not including closets here, because as far as I'm concerned, closets are fair game. Toss shit in there, clean them once a year, good enough. No, I'm just talking about the rooms and areas of my house that we use every. single. day. If I wasn't broke as hell, I'd pay someone to just come deep, deep clean my house, organize the shit out of it, and then teach me to maintain all of it at once. But I am broke as hell, so instead I keep stumbling over toys and moving the stacks of dishes from one counter to the next so I can strain spaghetti noodles. On a good day we have two clean rooms. On most days you're lucky if you can see the top of the kitchen table.

2. Putting my clothes away. The sad truth is, the top of the dryer serves as the closet for all three of us. We wash clothes {day and night and in our damn sleep because there is ALWAYS MORE LAUNDRY} and then we wear them out of the dryer. Pathetic, I know.

3. Cooking every single night of the week. This is really, really bad, and I'm almost too ashamed to admit it. I cook 3 or 4 nights of the week on a good week. If I'm a little extra busy than usual, or I have an absolute shit week, it's less. I went through my bank statement yesterday and added up what we've spent on eating out for the last 30 days. I won't even type that number, nor say it out loud, because it's way too much {see above comment about being broke as hell - this is why}. I think even the cooking comes back to not being organized enough. My fridge is a free for all of food in total disarray, I never remember to take chicken out of the freezer in the morning, and the pan I need always seems to be dirty.

4. Being productive on weekends. On Saturdays I used to have a glorious routine. I'd wake up at a reasonable time, feed the kids, let them watch t.v. while I cleaned up around the house, and then I packed them a lunch and we were out the door for errands. Grocery store, Costco, Walmart, the bank, etc., etc. until all our errands were done. Then when it was the baby's naptime we headed home. I put him to sleep, assigned Lainie to quiet time in her room for 1 hour, and I used the time to plan our menu for the week, clean up more around the house, put food away, prep food for future meals, organize shelves, do laundry. Now that Jackson doesn't always nap during the day anymore and the kids both sleep later on weekends, Saturdays have turned into a hazy blur of cartoons, the park, playdates, birthday parties, and an occasional run to the grocery store.

This post is undoubtedly making me appear unconscionably lazy and useless, but I promise I'm not! I just fell out of my domestic routine at some point...or maybe I never really developed a firm enough one that could withstand years and change and growing kids...who knows. I feel like I'm busy all the time, and I'm constantly running around like a crazy person - last night I was home from work for 3 hours before I even sat down - but these things just still manage to be outside my range of talents.

What are you terrible at, no matter how hard you try?