Clean. So Clean.

After years of living only marginally above total squalor, we finally hired a housekeeper. She and an assistant came over today and cleaned our house for FIVE HOURS. It is--breathtaking. You could eat off the inside of our trash can lid. If Greta wanted to crawl around the bathroom and then eat bananas, I'd let her. There is not a speck of dust on three floors of our house. There are no dead bugs in the windowsills. You could perform surgery inside our microwave.

Why, oh why, didn't we jump on the housecleaner-bandwagon long, long, long ago?

I make no pretense of doing any housecleaning whatsoever--I've resorted to buying microwavable meals at Trader Joe's because it's gotten to the point where I often don't have time to make lunch. And if I don't have time to eat, I definitely don't have time to clean. (And let's not kid ourselves: I hate cleaning.) Andrew, in our past, child-free life, would do his best to keep us livable; he once claimed to find cleaning relaxing. But now, with two kids and Andrew's demanding job, there is no possible way we could ever make our house this clean unless I spent every spare second cleaning. And that, my friends, is something I will simply not do.

I'm going to go lie in bed now and just breathe in the clean, clean room.