A little over a week ago my mom came for a visit. Felicity calls her "Nanny", and I wonder if Felicity is getting the same sense of imported slave labor that I had with my mom's mom. After a six hour drive, my mom storms into the house and says, "Where do we start?" In all seriousness, she is in the house for five minutes and she's cleaning the kitchen. For those of you who know our house, you know that despite our boldest attempts it's always a little untidy. I remember when we moved into the house and I thought that we'd NEVER fill up all of those rooms. Lo and behold, the house is filled to the brim. And where there's stuff, there's dust. And where there's dust, there's allergies. And with working full time and taking care of Felicity (not to mention being pregnant), the little things in the house usually fall by the wayside. And, to be honest, sometimes I am just too tired to deal with it.
But not Nanny. Oh, no. If she sits down on the couch, I can actually see her eyes surveying for something that needs to be done. In just five days, here's what she did:
Seeing that Felicity's books were overflowing, she went to the Container Store and bought two new bookshelves and reorganized the books. While at the Container Store, she realized that we needed a shelf for the medicine cabinet. She threw away about forty bottles of expired medicine, cleaned the cabinet, and organized all the medicines by type and frequency of use. (I'm serious.) Upon opening the fridge, she noticed that there were some half-used and perhaps spoiled things. This prompted an entire overhaul of the fridge. Since Chris's office is moving to the third floor so that we can use the previous office for a baby's room, we hired some boys to move about 400 books and seven bookshelves upstairs. But, in an effort to "help" the young 21 year old strong boys, Nanny hoisted the books back onto the shelves, not letting me help because I was pregnant! While up on the third floor, she noticed that my storage closet was poorly organized and taking up too much room. Another trip to the container store and she had returned with spacebags. She organized all of the baby clothes by size and vaccuumed them down to fit in labeled tubs. I cannot tell you how good it feels to be this organized.
And while I love how much help she gives me, I do wish that just one time she would come and relax. But oh, no. "When you have kids, you need help. Trust me, I know." And while I am pleased that I will be able to
