Half Changed World

First the update, then a few responses to the comments on why I think this matters.

Friday, T reported spending 2.5 hours on housework — 45 minutes cleaning the kitchen, 45 minutes on laundry, 30 minutes mopping the kitchen and bathroom (unfortunately we have light colored tile floors that look dirty 10 minutes after you finish cleaning them), and 30 minutes sorting the papers on his "launch pad" shelf.  He also spent 45 minutes cooking.  I spent 30 minutes cooking (I started the chili cooking in the crockpot in the morning) and about 15 minutes doing laundry and miscellaneous picking up (taking out the recycling, cleaning up after the cat, bringing in dishes from around the house).  I also spent 30 minutes cleaning up my desk and the area around it.  (Is that housework?  I don’t really think so, but it’s certainly comparable to T’s cleaning his launch pad.) 

Saturday, T spent 1.25 hours cleaning — half an hour in the kitchen, 45 minutes in the bedroom and family room, and about 15 minutes cooking.  I also spent about 15 minutes cooking (we had pancakes for breakfast, but went out for dinner), and about 15 minutes picking up and doing laundry.

Today, T spent 45 minutes cleaning — 15 minutes in the kitchen, 30 minutes doing the bathroom, and about 15 cooking.  I spent about 15 minutes cleaning and doing laundry.  We spent about 20 minutes together shopping, and about half an hour moving furniture around in the boys’ room.

So why do I think it’s worth paying attention to this?  Certainly I wouldn’t want to do it all the time, any more than I track every cent I spend all the time.  But I think both are worth doing for short periods of time.

First, it does draw attention to the division of labor.  I’ll admit that I’m feeling self-conscious to see that T is doing more household work than me, even on the weekend.  In my defense, I’ll say that I was taking care of the boys when T was cleaning.  I also think I may do more of the 30 seconds here and there type stuff, picking up socks and dirty dishes when I see them.  (But I’m also realizing that I may be giving myself too much credit for doing that.)

Second, I think that most people don’t have a particularly realistic sense of the "cost" of a certain level of cleanliness.  If you don’t realize that having a house that is "guest-clean" at all times requires 2 hours a day of cleaning, it’s easy to beat yourself up for not achieving that standard, to think that you’re lazy or inefficient.  Part of effective time management is knowing how long a task actually takes.

Third, in response to Jennifer’s comment, I do think it’s possible to make changes when you realize how long things really take.  You might institute a family rule that everyone only gets clean towels once a week, and people who leave their wet towels on the floor have to deal with the consequences.  You might decide that it’s really important to you to mop the kitchen every other day, but that you’re willing to only vacuum once a week (or vice versa).  Or you might decide that you’re willing to hire a housecleaner.

If anyone else decides to track this for a while, please let me know.  I’d love to see what this looks like in other households.

Last week’s NYTimes article on mothers’ labor force participation (which I also wrote about last Friday) suggests that the decline in housework that has occurred over the past 40 years may have reached a limit — that we can’t reasonably go much lower.  I’m not sure if I think that’s true. 

I have no idea how messy the average house is, to be honest, or how we compare.  We do a pretty good job of staying on top of the dirty dishes and the laundry (since we don’t have a basement, there’s no real room to let the laundry pile up), but the clutter (books, papers, toys) builds up as fast as we can put it away.  And by the time we’ve cleared away the clutter, we often run out of steam before we get to the sweeping/vacuuming/mopping stage.

So I asked my husband if he’d be willing to track all the housework we did for a week, and he said sure. He even suggested we post photos.  (We’ve been snapping them, but I don’t have the energy to transfer them tonight.)

So, today is day 1.  T reports that he spent 1 hour grocery shopping today, 1 hour cooking (we had chicken paprikash), and 2.75 hours doing housework (.5 hours cleaning the kitchen, .25 hours cleaning up after each of lunch and dinner, .25 hours running laundry, .75 hours sorting and putting it away, .5 hours picking up the dining room, and .25 hours picking up the library/family room).  He says that’s about average — I think it’s probably a bit more than usual.  But that might be a sign of the invisibility of housework — you only notice it when it’s not done.

I spent about 20 minutes cooking (mostly making challah for tomorrow, but also putting my breakfast and lunch together) and about 40 minutes cleaning — 10 minutes cleaning the kitchen (scrubbing the stovetop and the microwave, which didn’t rise to the top of T’s list), 15 minutes putting away laundry, and 15 minutes picking up in the library. I also spent about 30 minutes trying to get caught up recording our finances, which got a bit scrambled by not having access to my computer files for two weeks.  And now I’ve spent about 30 minutes blogging and checking my messages, and I think I’m going to bed.

A while back, I ran across a meme of listing all the computers you’ve owned.   (Sorry, can’t remember where — happy to post links if you claim credit.)  I thought I’d revive it in honor of the new computer that I’m anxiously awaiting — according to UPS’s tracking info, it left Shanghai early Sunday and is now en route from Louisville, KY.

0)  My family’s first computer was my brother’s, which he got for his Bar Mitzvah.  It was an Apple II+, and didn’t have a floppy drive when he first got it — you could record programs onto an audiocassette.  My Palm is far more powerful than it was, but I’m still impressed with how much you could do with it.  Screenwriter was a perfectly functional word processor, and VisiCalc an adequate spreadsheet.  My brother and I spent hours playing the Infocom text adventures, and even my mother played Little Brick Out.

1)  When my brother went to college, and took his computer with him, I soon made the case that I needed a computer of my own.  Even though I was required to take typing in sixth grade, the idea of typing a paper with a typewriter was absolutely horrifying to me.  For my Bat Mitzvah, I got an Apple IIc.  I believe the "c" was for compact, and it was half the size of the II+.  Unfortunately, affordable LCDs were far in the future, so it was never better than "luggable."  It did have a modem, and I got onto my first BBS (Echo) using it.

2)  The Apple IIc lasted me until my senior year in college.  At that point, it was becoming increasingly less reliable, and I was afraid that if it crashed while I was writing my senior paper, no one else would have a computer that could read the disks.  My parents bought me a Gateway PC.  I’m pretty sure it ran Windows 3.1, not DOS.

2a)  Sometime a couple of years later, something went wrong — I think with the video card.  I discovered that no one else’s products could fit into the cute mini-tower case from Gateway.  So I had the local computer store transplant all the brains from the Gateway into a generic standard size case and replace the fried card.   That hybrid lasted me through graduate school.

3)  At some point after we had moved to Virginia, I was coveting a laptop, but couldn’t justify their cost, since I really just wanted it for wordprocessing.  I bought a used one off of eBay, a few years old.  It turned out to be a lemon — the battery wouldn’t hold a charge, and even plugged in, it often turned itself off without warning.  This is the only thing I’ve ever bought off of eBay that I really felt like I got ripped off on.

4)  A couple of years later, the Gateway computer crashed.  After fighting with it for a few hours, my husband pointed out that I could get a brand new computer — much faster — for $600 from CompUSA.  This one was a HP.

5)  This was the first time I got a new computer because I wanted more processing power.   About two years ago, as I was getting into digital photography, my husband gave me some tips on how to do things with Photoshop.   I complained about how long they took to do, and he was surprised.  When he tried for himself, he suggested I get a new computer.  I got a $400 machine from Dell, and it was about 20 times faster.   

Unfortunately, it hasn’t been the most reliable machine — the hard drive crashed completely while it was still under warranty, and then this month one of the system files got corrupted, making it impossible to boot.  T popped the hard drive out, and we can read it from another machine, so at least I can rescue the last month or so of un-backed up files.  Once everything is copied safely over to my new machine, we’ll try reinstalling Windows.  But I used this as an excuse to finally get a laptop.

What struck me most as I thought about this list is 1) how much more affection I have for the early Apples than for any of the PCs I’ve had in the years between and 2) how much shorter my replacement cycle has gotten.  Some of that is because I’ve gotten more affluent, but it’s also because the price of computers has gotten so low.  When I got the Gateway, a respectable desktop was going for about $1000, and the comparable laptop for twice that.  Both those figures have fallen in half, in nominal dollars.

On D’s birthday last month, he woke up, remembered that it was his birthday and immediately asked us "Do I look older?  I’m five now!"  We smiled and tried to explain to him that it doesn’t work that way, that he gets a little older and a little bigger every day, not just on his birthday. 

Except that maybe it does work that way.  Since his birthday, D has a) gotten dressed entirely by himself (including finding clothes in his dresser) for the first time and b) willingly laid back in the bathtub and gotten his hair wet for the first time. (Yes, I know some of your kids did these things at age three. D somehow missed the "I do it myself" stage, and we made a deliberate choice not to press him on these things when there was a baby in the house getting lots of attention.)

Maybe it’s coincidence, but I wouldn’t be at all surprised if he’s simply decided that he’s a big five-year-old now, and can do these things.  That seems to be the way he operates; he was a late walker too, but walked with total confidence within weeks of starting.

Last summer, when D was zooming around the park quite confidently on his bike, we asked him if he wanted us to take off the training wheels so he could see if he could ride it without them.  Without hesitation, he answered "no, I’ll do that when I’m five."  I just bet he will.

Today’s snow was about perfect as far as I’m concerned.  It came on a weekend, so wasn’t the huge logistical nightmare that midweek snowstorms are around here.  And I got to play with the boys instead of going into work.  (Since we live close to the metro, it almost never snows enough that I can’t make it into work.  And since T is home, even the schools shutting down doesn’t give me a good excuse to stay home and play in the snow.)  We got about 8 inches, enough to make snowmen, have a snowball fight, and take the boys sledding at the Masonic memorial, but not so much that there was danger of either of the boys getting stuck in a drift.

Playing with the boys was especially sweet because I wasn’t sure I was ever going to get to do it, at least with D.  He has mild sensory issues, and this is the first time that he’s been willing to play in the snow.  In the past, he’s totally refused to walk in the snow, even in boots.  He liked the idea of snowball fights — but only the throwing part, not the getting hit part.  He’s outgrown a lot of his issues — he used to be unwilling to walk on grass — and so I was hopeful that he’d eventually be willing to play in the snow, but I wasn’t sure it would happen.  But today, he had a great time, and was even willing to lay down and make snow angels.

I feel a little sheepish admitting how bugged I was by D’s dislike of snow and sand.  Obviously, in the scheme of things, it’s not a big deal.  But playing in the snow and digging on the beach were parts of my mental image of childhood and parenting.

My name is Elizabeth and I’m a book addict.

The vast majority of the books I read are from the library.  I have cards from two library systems — the city I live in, and the larger nearby county.  Both libraries have online catalogs, where you can search for books you want, and put holds on them if they’re out, or at a different branch.  So there’s usually a stack of books waiting for me every time I go.  The problem is that it’s easy to get carried away — I currently have 10 books checked out from one library, and 21 from the other.  (Yes, some of them are for the boys, who don’t have their own cards yet, but most of them are mine.) 

You can renew books online too, but only if no one else has put a hold on them, and there’s no way to check whether that’s the case in advance.  So it turns out I’ve got about 4 books that I haven’t started which are due this weekend and can’t be renewed.  So I’ve got to either return them unread, suck up the late fees, or sit up all night to finish them.  Probably some combination of the above.  (Even with the late fees, it’s much cheaper than buying the books, but I feel guilty about having overdue books, especially when I know someone else is waiting for them.)

If neither of the libraries that I use has a book, and I really want to read it, I’ll try to get it used, either from Powells or Amazon marketplace.   Powell’s has free shipping if you order $50 a time, which just encourages me to buy even more books.  And then I feel like I need to read the books I have out from the library first, so the ones I buy tend to sit around for a long time before I get to them.  One year I vowed not to buy any books until I read everything I owned that I hadn’t read.  I didn’t make it through the year, but I did catch up a bit.

I almost never buy new books for myself, but they’re my favorite thing to give as a gift, so I feel like I’m doing my share to keep the publishing industry afloat. 

Last week, I borrowed Fly Away Home from the library to watch with D.  I winced when I realized within the first few minutes of the movie that they were about to kill off the mother, but it was done subtly enough that I think it went straight over D’s head.  He  loved the movie, and is going around saying that he’s going to ask for it for his sixth birthday (which is only 11 1/2 months away).

We finished our reading of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe over the weekend.  Prompted by Jody’s lovely description of reading scary stories to an empty room, with her kids peaking around the doorway, it occurred to me that I probably shouldn’t send D to bed having just read the chapter in which Aslan is killed.  So we read two chapters that night, moving right from the death to the rebirth, with hardly a chance to think in between.

Sunday night we watched March of the Penguins.  Some of you are probably seeing the problem coming, but I was totally blindsided.  I wasn’t sure D would have the patience to sit through the whole thing, but he did.  And then some of the eggs were dropped and froze.  And some of the adult penguins were eaten by the leopard seals.  And when the big blizzard hit just after the eggs hatched, and some of the penguins chicks froze to death, he looked at the pictures of the pathetic little bodies and asked if they were going to come back to life.  And we said no, in this world people and animals don’t come back to life when they’re dead.  And he burst into tears. 

We stopped the movie and held him, and agreed that yes, it is sad, and yes, it’s ok to cry, and no, we don’t know why everything has to die.  And after a bit he calmed down and blew his nose, and we watched the rest of the movie.

Of all the things I want for my children, I think I most want them to develop empathy, to be people who pay attention to how things affect others, to be mensches.   But I don’t want them to be what a friend calls "skinless," totally exposed to the harshness and craziness of the world.   

Last year, I wrote a post for DotMoms about my stress over my son’s birthday party — whether to invite the whole class, where to have it, what to do.   (As it turned out, he got very sick the day of this party and we had to cancel.)

This year, given essentially the same set of facts, we decided to go the rec center route, and invite his whole class.  Basically, we decided that we’d rather spend the money than the emotional energy worrying about whether we were doing the right thing.  And I’m hopeful that next year, with D in elementary school, there will be less social pressure to invite the whole class.

After considering pirate and Buzz Lightyear themes, D asked for a Max and Ruby party (after reading Bunny Party).  This was reflected in the invitations, the cakes (Max’s chocolate mud cake and Ruby’s raspberry fluff cupcakes), and the goody bags.  The kids ran themselves crazy in the play room for an hour and then enjoyed the cake, balloons, and my husband’s juggling.  We were a bit frazzled the whole time — the rec center schedules parties pretty tightly together, so we couldn’t prep the party room in advance — but I think the party was a success.  Even if we didn’t have The Great Zucchini.

I’m wiped.  Good night.

It’s one of those laws of parenting — going out late for dessert and drinks with friends guarantees that the kids will wake up early, especially when your partner is away and so you can’t roll over and beg for an extra half an hour of rest.  I brought the boys up to my bed for a while, but that only bought me maybe 20 minutes.

By 9 am, I had read:

• Old Black Fly (three times)
• Bang Bang Rattle Book (three times)
• Let’s Ask Four Questions (twice)
• Touch and Feel Playtime
• Kitten’s First Full Moon (twice)

So I’m not feeling too guilty about the fact that I’m letting D watch The Magic School Bus Space Adventures while N naps this afternoon.  I’m not sure what we’ll do when N wakes up, but we’ll deal with it then.

The last time we were at Costco, D asked me to buy a box of GoGurt.  I’m not quite sure how he heard of GoGurt — whether he somehow saw an ad for it on TV in spite of our best attempts to TiVo out all the commercials, or if one of his friends brought it to school.  It’s fairly high in sugar, but not otherwise bad for him, and we’re always trying to get him to try new foods, so I said sure.

As it happens, GoGurt is having a Narnia movie tie-in promotion, so all of the tubes have pictures of different characters.  D understands that there’s a lion, and a witch (who is bad even though she’s very pretty), and informed me yesterday that the movie is "coming soon on DVD."  I’m not sure whether D could handle the movie yet — I think it might scare him — but in any case, I want his first encounter with the story to be with the book.

So when we went to the library tonight, I asked him if he wanted me to look for a Narnia book.  They did have several copies of The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe, so we took it out.  When I finished reading the first chapter, D asked "what’s a faun?" and I told him that after he brushed his teeth, we could look on the computer and see if we could find a picture of one.  And sure enough, the Narnia website has pictures of all the main characters.

So, between the marketing tie-ins and the multi-media experience, it’s not exactly an unmediated encounter between a child and the story.  But if that’s what it takes for him to have the patience for a chapter book, I can live with that.  Because getting to read stories that I loved to my kids is up there on my top 10 list of perks of parenting.