They had it coming.

I suppose every family has a couple of things to which they expose their impressionable offspring at a less than appropriate age. Currently, my children are:

• walking around saying how YOU doin'? a'la Joey Tribiani from Friends
• watching the Cell Block Tango from the Chicago dvd over and over and over again. All those scantily clad hot jailbirds singing about murder. My small sons can't get enough. Mummy can we watch that one where the girls in jail killed those men? Next they'll be trying out the dance moves.
  

Has your family got some?


Meantime I am living on the edge, without virus protection!! Whilst the good folk at AVG try and work out why their software sucks on my computer. And I tried posting another thumb-typing blog via the mobile phone but it's disappeared, probably went to Mars by mistake. I hope it comes back soon but I can't be arsed typing it again, let alone thumb-typing it.

Cinderella and the Fairy House-Cleaner

I've had a plan in my head for a good few months now. A housework plan. It's Plan B. Plan A was when I bought this book and thought I could keep the place sweet by doing 15 minutes a day, but it turned out that I prefer to have one really good bang at it and get it over and done with. In one hit rather than making house-cleaning some kind of never-ending treadmill, every day of my life - on top of all the cooking and tidying and laundry and shopping as well. However. Those big cleaning blitzes? They've gradually become further and further apart as I've progressively lost interest in cleaning. I like living in a clean house but I resent actually doing the cleaning.

Anyway. Plan B was me thinking that I could use some of the money I make from teaching tap to pay a cleaning lady once a fortnight. Classes are going well and business is expanding and paying someone for 2 hours a fortnight would probably not cost more than, say, Fixit buying 2 coffees a day. Which he does.

I've pondered it of course. Mostly in a wouldn't it be fantastic to not have to clean the toilet? sort of way, admittedly. But also in a can I justify this when (i) I am a stay-at-home mother so if I were to use my time efficiently I wouldn't need to do this and (ii) this is a luxury and we aren't really in a financial position to bear luxuries and (iii) I would probably object if Fixit suddenly decided he wanted to outsource the lawn-mowing.

I answered myself with this sort of stuff:
...staying at home is about looking after the kids, not about cleaning the house. No-one needed to Stay Home and Do Cleaning before we had the babies. Before Children the cleaning was seen as something we both did. Now, even though I'm child-wrangling, volunteering at both Climber's school and Cherub's crèche, teaching 9 classes of tap a week and doing the admin involved with having my own business, doing ALL the cooking, doing ALL the grocery shopping and 80% of the laundry, even with all of that, somehow the house-cleaning falls in my To-Be-Done tray. Despite the fact that the labour involved has trebled since the advent of kids into the domestic scene. Not to mention the mound of stuff jibbering away behind the door of the Spare Room, which should be sorted; there's this tone Fixit gets when he mentions this which stems from his space (the shed) being organised to within an inch of its life and my space (the house) being a whole lot of cardboard boxes filled with god-knows-what stacked up in a darkened room with a pretty cloth thrown over the top. (Oh and also his conviction that blogging has taken over my life to the detriment of the household but that's a separate issue.)

To be honest, in answer to my doubts (i) yes, I could get it all done if I lifted my game (ii) yes, luxuries are out if we ever want to think about getting a mortgage and (iii) yes, I probably would think Fixit was frittering away Our Money if he hired Jim's Mowing.

But. My little dream persists. For all sorts of reasons.

• It's my money, after all. (Unlike the grass-cutting money which would be our money.)
• Business is looking up.
• I'm domestically lazy.
• I prefer doing stuff like reading or blogging to cleaning.
  
• With the Family Allowance and my tap earnings, I pay for all household expenses and extras, so I'm putting in financially and domestically.
• Even if we cut out all luxuries, we probably still couldn't get a mortgage in the current housing crisis in Australia.
• If kitty-cats and motorbikes are okay then why not this?
  
• I would -theoretically- have more energy to look at the junk in the back room.
• I would be happier.
• The house would be nicer.
  

As you can see, I've talked myself into it. It all sounds perfectly fair to me. And then on the car-trip to Canberra I blithely announced my intentions to Fixit, thinking he would be pleased to know that the house would be regularly nice again and that I would be happier with more time to sort out crap etc., and I am sorry to report that I received a Very Negative Response. You know, based along the lines of (i) (ii) and (iii). (That always makes it worse, doesn't it, when you know the other person's objections are grounded in truths?) But I was so gobsmacked and so angry that my stomach started burning from just ... acid.... and even if we hadn't been in a confined space with the kids I don't think I could have coherently argued my corner. So I spluttered a bit and didn't mention it again.

So we were at a bit of an impasse, and, true to form, neither of us was bringing it up to discuss it. You could be forgiven for wondering who would emerge happy from this lack of seeing-eye-to-eyeness ?

Well, as far as I'm concerned, Plan B is alive and well. I got the number of the cleaning lady today so if I was a horse the knowing ones would be backing me.