The Driving Me Crazy list.

Mark went out of town last Monday and didn't come home till late Friday afternoon.  It was the first business trip since the baby was born -- in fact the first week he was back at work full time.  On Thursday morning, while I was waiting for Hannah to get to my house, I paced from room to room, scattered with toys and books and crumpled paper airplanes and the occasional apple core, and slowly boiled inside.  In particular I stood in the little office at the end of the hall upstairs -- the one that is the "focal point" of the upstairs hallway --

(mental note:  if you hate cluttered-looking things, NEVER EVER EVER design a house so that an office is the focal point of a hallway, no matter how spic-and-span they look in the Pottery Barn catalog)

--and stood there and looked at the Legos and the piles of unfiled papers and the cardboard box full of torn-open envelopes and statements and flyers from the last bill-paying session and the scraps of paper that the children had pulled out of the box and cut up with scissors and left lying on the floor --

-- and I could just feel myself getting angrier and angrier and angrier.

For a brief moment I entertained the thought of paging Mark at the plant in Tennessee so I could yell at him about the bin of paper.

Fortunately I did not entertain that one for long.  I mean, for one thing, he pays the bills every month so I don't have to.  Must I quibble about the detritus?  Seriously, perspective.

Anyway, I grabbed a pen and a pad of paper and wrote DRIVING ME CRAZY across the top in big letters.  Then I began to enumerate.

1.  Office full of toys

2.  Office full of unfiled papers

3.  Kids walk around eating apples

4.  Kids leave apple cores on the carpet

5.  Kids don't hang up coats...

Astonishingly, nothing *I* am responsible for ended up on the DRIVING ME CRAZY list, which ran to about thirty items.  By the time I had filled up the sheet, I felt much, much better.  Filling the sheet up also made me feel as if I could actually do something about the problems besides wander from room to room getting more steamed.  

So I cleaned the bathrooms, except for the tubs which are too hard to do with the baby in the sling.  It was the first time I had deep cleaned anything since the baby was born.   I didn't finish before Hannah arrived, but I felt so much less pissy that it was worth it.

 I showed the list to Hannah when she got to my house.  She was probably glad not to appear on it herself.

The next day when Mark got home, I went over the list (well, actually, a somewhat stripped-down version) with him, and we decided we needed some new house rules and new emphasis on the kids' cleaning up after themselves, now that we have the baby keeping us tired and busy.  We posted them.  Griping has ensued, but at least the expectations are all a lot clearer.

Comments

[Rebekka]

I would have griped too, back when I was a kid, but now the apple cores would have given me a fit in about thirty seconds.

[Lori]

:-) The unfiled papers thing must run in the family. Dad and I are totally guilty of that, as well. I'm not so sure about the apple cores thing, though.

[Barbara C.]

I think it's a fairly common thing. Having a new baby in the house really makes you reevaluate EVERYTHING. Maybe because it forces you stop and take a step back from it all.