I have often heard stories about pregnant women who get the “nesting” urge.  The urge is supposed to hit before birth.  Pregnant women who get the nesting urge have an uncontrollable urge to fix up the house and get things ready for the baby.

I am not sure why, but I have officially begun to get the nesting urge at 5 months along.  Perhaps it is because our house is under construction, or perhaps it is because we already have a large family and all the mess that goes along with a large family.  At any rate, I believe I am driving my dear husband slightly crazy; and I know for a fact that the neighbors regard my recent obsession with mulch and flowers as amusing.

In addition to gardening–which I wanted to do before it gets too hot here in the south–and I painted the baseboard trim in the house.  Today, I’m sore and tired.

In discussing nesting urges with my girlfriends, I found that most of us felt the urge to begin and finish seemingly meaningless tasks.  One of my friends had her husband replace the kitchen linoleum several times before finding just the “right” one.  Years later, she and her husband laugh about this.  “It’s not like the baby came home from the hospital and thanked me for choosing just the right shade of flooring!  I don’t know what I was thinking!”

Did you get any nesting urges when you were expecting?

So I’m moving house, and today the leasing agent came by take photographs. I cleaned, and moved junk out of sight, and took the diaper pail down to the basement, and put all the toys away while Toddler was sleeping. Washed all the dishes and put them away, hid the toys that live on the confiscated shelf (mostly small chokable objects that Toddler tried to feed to Daycare Baby, and large hard objects Toddler tried to whack Daycare Baby with), cleaned the bath and washed the floors.

Don’t houses look different when you can see the floors? As a mom of one of my own and up to two more of other peoples, it’s rare that I get to see much of the flooring.

Anyway, the agent is coming at 10. Toddler gets up ay 7am and Daycare Baby arrives at 9. All I have to do is keep the house tidy for three hours. Hard?

Usually my house is fairly clean and fairly untidy. Not revolting by any means, there’s usually lots of toys scattered around and I don’t usually make the bed and all the dishes live in the drainer after they are washed. And there is probably a sippy cup under the couch. And a couple of my coffee cups that I got distracted and didn’t take back to the kitchen. Pretty normal, yes? (If you tell me “Normal” actually means spotless and gleaming and only one toy out at a time, I’m not going to listen.)

Toddler doesn’t care to understand “Tidy” and Daycare Baby certainly doesn’t, and she’s in a particularly intense getting-things-out stage. I have to feed him, feed her second breakfast, run around after him because he won’t sit still to eat, then run around some more picking up all the things they get out and then abandon. And the socks they take off, and the pillows they throw on the floor, and all the other baby mess that I don’t really notice on a day-to-day basis because I normally ignore anything that’s not going to stain the floor until the end of the day and do one big pick up. It’s much more efficient.

So by 10 I’m exhausted and so relived to see the agent. She comes in, looks about, takes one photo then drops her camera on the floor. It breaks. Curses curses curses.

This reveals two reasons why being too tidy is not good. If I hadn’t tidied, the odds would have been excellent that the camera’s fall would have been cushioned by a squashy block or a dolly or a heap of dirty toddler socks. And now I have to keep the place tidy long enough for me to find the battery charger for my camera so I can take photos. Where did I tidy that away to?

If I told you that I spent half of Christmas Day, December 25, sewing and doing the laundry, would you believe me?

Yes, I did. Honest. The Christmas dinner had been eaten the night before (as German tradition goes), my husband was napping, while the kids were happily playing with their new toys. So I decided to catch up with the housework.

Of course, while working, I made phone calls to family and friends scattered around the globe – gosh, keeping track of those time zones can be tiring – to greet them a very Merry Christmas.

And in between, I reflected back to Christmases of childhood past. Of a large chaotic family. Of large feasts or simple fares depending on the finances of the season. Of fun, laughter, and Christmas carols. Of Christmas dinners on the terrace and Christmas lunches on the beach. Sorry for being so nostalgic but how I wish my kids could experience the kind of Christmas I had as a child.

When I moved to another country on another continent with another climate and culture, I then had to resign myself to a different way of celebrating Christmas, one that is quite, calm, and well – cold.

I am not complaining. I have many things to be grateful for. A happy home, a wonderful family, a warm house, a full pantry – and an afternoon walk around the lake with the whole family. My cup runs over (almost).

So how did you spend your Christmas?

Earlier today, our cat threw up and soon after, the baby rode across the kitchen and into the throw-up, in his walker. Yuck.

When you’ve got kids, you’ve got messes. At times, my husband goes with the flow and accepts this fact pretty well. Occasionally, though, he’ll get into his uptight, neat-freak mode and be very bothered by it. During these times, he dwells on things like fingerprints on the walls and cabinets.

I like a clean house, too but I refuse to drive myself crazy about it. I tell my husband to relax when he gets irritable about fingerprints, spills and other messy situations. The good part about his neat-freak mode is that he notices dirt and helps with the cleaning. I just can’t get to a lot of the housework, now that we have a baby again.

Chasing after a baby on the go, reminds me of when our older boys were babies and all the things they got into and messes they made. I walked into the kitchen when our oldest son was a toddler and found him sliding around the tile floor on a bunch of smashed raw eggs. He had opened the refrigerator and dumped one dozen eggs from their carton.

On another occasion, our middle son, then age 2, decided to get artistic on our brand new cream-colored carpet. He drew different colored lines from one side of the room to the other. Who knew that crayons showed up so well on carpet? Then, not long after that he decided to pee from the open stairway on the second floor onto the first floor.

These times made me want to scream but soon afterward I was able to laugh. I’ve got to give the kids credit for being creative. I couldn’t make up anything funnier than some of the crazy things they do. Yes, life is messy but life without kids would be something I dread much more: it would be lonely and boring.

Does your partner help with the housework? What memorable messes have your little ones made?

We’re guilty of it – not cleaning our daughter’s toys as often as we should. I’m sure we aren’t the only ones who just don’t seem to have cleaning the toys high on the priorities list, although we certainly should. Kids? toys, especially when shared with other children, can be a breeding ground for bacteria and viruses that can get your kids (and anyone else who touches the toys, including parents cleaning up the playroom) sick. Or, if your child has been sick recently, it’s important to clean his or her toys to remove any germs and keep him or her from getting sick again.

The next time you’re gathering up all those hard plastic blocks, cups, rattles or whatever it is that blankets your play room or living room floor, don’t just dump them back into the toy bin – clean them.

How often should you clean baby and toddler toys? Clorox says weekly, or every other week, especially if your kids have been sick. Always clean toys according to the instructions (especially wood, cloth or plush toys). For hard plastic toys, remember that most of them can simply be run in the top rack of the dish washer or scrubbed by hand with some soapy water in the kitchen sink.

To disinfect hard plastic toys, use a combination of bleach and water. First, wash, rinse or scrub the toys with water. Then, in the sink, a clean bucket or even the bath tub, mix together a solution of bleach and a gallon of water. Let them soak for five minutes, then rinse thoroughly and let them air dry, spread out on a clean, dry towel.

I’ve used some professional cleaning services in the past. When I was pregnant with my second baby my husband injured his leg, so the two of us combined couldn’t keep up with the household chores very well…at least not as well as we should have to satisfy my pregnant-out-to-here panic of wanting a clean house before the baby was born.

I also hired a cleaning crew when my husband was coming home from his six month military tour. Although I had managed to keep the house is an acceptable state, I wanted him to come home to a really clean house and that just wasn’t happening if I tried to do it with my two Little Ones in tow.

Lately I’ve been working a lot, and although I feel really blessed to be able to work from home I’ve found that the household chores have been suffering a little. I get the basic stuff done so things don’t get too gross, but things like scrubbing the shower and dusting get ignored a lot of the time.

I was having coffee with a friend of mine who has a house cleaning business and she looked me square in the eye and said, “If you work, and you can afford it, you should have someone come in once in a while to help with the cleaning.” It clicked right then…why not?

My husband has been urging me to get someone in here to help me for a while, so he was all for it. My friend recommended another friend of hers (because there is no way in God’s Green Earth that I’m hiring my friend to come scrub my toilets…that’s just weird) so at the end of this month she’ll start coming in twice a month to do the cleaning that I never seem to get done.

Indulgent? Sure. I think, however, that this is going to help lower my stress level and make our house a more pleasant place to live in. I’m excited!

Today I stopped by a friend’s house unannounced to drop off a flyer for a church function. Actually, I didn’t think she was going to be there so I didn’t think it was a rude move since I would just slip the flyer under her door and call her later. It turns out she was there, and before I could apologize for stopping by without an invite she blurted out, “Hi! My house is a mess!”

I got to thinking about how I would react if someone were to stop by my house unannounced and I really think that the first words out of my mouth would be along the same lines. I long ago came to grips with the fact that if I’m going to work from home while raising my two kids there is an excellent chance that the majority of the time my house is not going to be guest-ready. Don’t get me wrong…I clean up if I know that someone is going to come over, but on a day to day basis there are toys on the floor, dishes in the sink, and I swear the unfolded clothes on the couch are silently mocking me.

Why should I feel guilty about this? My first priority is to make sure that the kids are okay, my second priority is to make sure that my deadlines are met, and my third priority is to make sure the house is in good order. I’d say that if I make it all the way down that tier and have everything set then it’s a really, really good day.

Today’s experience with my friend helped me to realize that I’m not the only mom with a messy house. You may laugh that I actually needed that revelation, but sometimes I think we forget how difficult a job it is to keep kids content and relatively injury-free. If our houses are a little messy but our kids are thriving, then I think that’s a pretty good trade-off, isn’t it?

When I was pregnant with my daughter (now three years old), my hubby did all of the household cleaning that used poisons and toxic cleaners as I didn’t want to inhale the fumes and potentially harm my unborn child.

Once my daughter started eating solids and using her highchair and booster seat trays, I struggled with finding a way to clean the trays without using harmful chemicals, but ensuring that they were disinfected at the same time. In the end, I used vinegar (my new best friend) by diluting it slightly and putting it into a spray bottle. I felt good knowing that her tray was being sanitized and continued to be a clean and safe surface for her food–as we all know, babies and toddlers don’t exactly love to use the dishes that their food arrives in.

As my daughter continued to grow, I decided that I would try switching to more natural cleaning products in the house, as she was always around when I was cleaning and was therefore being exposed to all of the harmful fumes from the chemicals that I was using.

I switched to using hydrogen peroxide and vinegar solutions (in individual spray bottles) to disinfect all of our counter tops, vinegar on our hardwood and ceramic tiles and baking soda sprayed with vinegar in the toilets. Baking soda also works as a great abrasive for cleaning showers and bathtubs.

I have also been experimenting with some of the natural and green lines of cleaners that are on the market, but truthfully, I am slightly skeptical as to how well some of them work or if in fact they are truly non toxic!

I do feel much better that my daughter nor I are inhaling toxic chemicals every time I clean, especially now that I am pregnant again.

Some other natural cleaning substances include lemon juice, certain essential oils and salt (as an abrasive).

Vinegar is by far my favorite, though, it has so many uses! I have even sprayed fruit with my vinegar spray bottle in order to remove germs and wax residue. Soaking lettuce in a vinegar and water mix can help clean the lettuce as well as crisp up the leaves prior to using them in a salad.

I’d love to hear your thoughts, ideas and opinions on using natural cleaners. As well, if you do choose the natural route, what do you use?