Slob-proofing and the secret inner life of the happy homemaker

I admit it.  I can be a little OCD with the cleaning of the house.  I'm better than I used to be but I still do L-O-V-E a clean, tidy home and I will often do exactly what it takes to get it that way.

When you live in a teeny, tiny space like mine in The Village, you become accustomed to the constant picking-up, tidying, de-cluttering followed by the down-to-basics dusting, cleaning, wiping needed to keep the place looking reasonable.  The tidying takes forever.  It literally seems never-ending to me.  A family in the space requires that all of us living here be on the same page and that isn't always the case.  They try but only after some serious nagging and/or  after I give them the look.

The cleaning actually doesn't actually take that long because the place is so small.  But small spaces means that clutter builds up faster.  Once the clutter is out of the way, the rest is easy.  The problem I find is that I'm so wiped out from the tidying that the next step just seems like too much.  I have lost the energy needed to go the extra mile.

At times like these, I look for those little cheats that make my life easier.  Or perhaps they just make me a little happier.  Well, they certainly help to get me closer to happier a little faster.  Yes, fast and easy.  No wonder I get an endorphin rush from a clean house!

These include the double laundry hamper I can throw everything in and - voila - the house looks picked up.  The slight patten to the area rugs hide less-than-perfect care.  Dramatic contrast of dark and light to take the eye away from the flaws in older paint job on the walls.  The books pulled out to the edge of the bookshelf to make appear as a smooth surface and pushes away the dust from the edge of the shelf, away from view.  There are lots of cheats like this we all have.

When I ran across a link on my Twitter feed today - thanks to the Amish Furniture folks - it reminded me of the sneaky little things I do to keep the place looking spiffy in a jiffy without breaking a sweat.

It is about furniture designed for slobs.  Or perhaps, with slobs in mind, would be a better way to put it.

It caught my attention because it is marketed as something different.  It's designed to be a big cheat, of sorts.  Check out this so-called furniture line for slobs:  "gently-priced, family-friendly, eco-friendly and slob-proof" furniture.  It sounds fantastic - almost too good to be true.  I will be checking this out myself a little further...  It could be perfect for me.  I'm not a slob - and neither are you - but we can all use a little less time taking care of our homes and a little more time taking care of ourselves.  Think dark chocolate, red wine, great movies while curled up on your slob-resistant furniture...

The prints and patterns featured in these pics in the piece on their own will hide most trouble a family may spill up on itself.  Not to mention the pets...

No, I won't really mention them.  That is so far out of my area of knowledge or expertise.  I won't go there.

In the meantime, my own slob-proof adventures in furniture include my reupholstered dining room chairs - renewed for me by The Great Cover Up, home to a true local furniture artist and restorer - in wonderful, family-friendly fabric for next to no money that I wash with dish soap and warm water once a month or before hosting a party - whichever comes first.  (That's usually the party.)

Such an amazing, easy care solution she offered me with this fabric years ago.  It was a good move.  And if - more likely, when - I want to upgrade to something more soothing and smooth to the touch (and a bit more expensive, I imagine) I will head back to the small shop on Chesterfield with my six chairs in tow.  (What a perfect street for an upholsterer, eh?  Chesterfield Street!)

The other good move made was the apartment sized couch purchased from Three Chairs in Ann Arbor a few years ago.

It was listed as the Annie sofa so it was literally calling my name...  I had to buy it.  And what a buy it was!

Still, after many years of living with our family - and being the main place we plop ourselves for our in-house dvd or on-line Netflix viewing marathons - it is still looking pretty darn good.

It is a microfiber sofa so it also comes clean with a cloth soaked in dish-soapy, warm water.  Very easy care, compact and still looking as good as it feels to curl up on.  It is still the most comfortable place to sit in the living room.

It's simple, straightforward soap-and-water cleaning.  Plus a little extra elbow grease thrown in when I have put it off a little too long  - I tend to not wipe the furniture down as often as I should.  When I get around to it, it can be a bigger job.  It's on my big spring cleaning list, one based on Martha Stewart's list - something to look forward to.  Hey, this stuff is easy care but it's not self-cleaning nor is it not totally slob-proof...  yet.

This all feels a bit confessional - like soaking my nails in dish soap, talking with Madge the manicurist - admitting to my obvious cleaning obsession while owning up to the fact that I don't actually clean it all that often or that well, perhaps.  Yes, I do confess:  I rely heavily on my cheats.

It's a little secret of mine - something which keeps me happy on the home-front.  Pass the chocolate and the remote.

Gadgets gadgets gadgets.... argh!

Living in a small space with a "teeny-tiny kitchen" as I do, I have a policy on - and a veto over - whatever comes into the house.  I am quite particular about what comes into the kitchen.  It has to be compact, shared, and/or multiple use.  No exceptions.

I read this piece today in the NYTimes Dining section on kitchen appliances and gadgets at a trade show and it hit a nerve right away.

The vendors at this show are the trendsetters who shape our lives and our kitchens - we, the mothers, the "deciders" in home - the kitchen gate-keepers.

These vendors are real-world Jack Donaghy's.

If you are not one of the 100 or so dedicated viewers of NBC's 30 Rock, Jack Donaghy - played by Alec Baldwin - alludes to the importance in history of the invention of the popcorn button on the microwave and was himself, until recently, the executive in charge of an NBC TV show and microwave ovens.  He is famous for the invention of the Trivection oven...  It's very funny and it's all at GE's appliance division's expense.

Life imitates "art" in this slightly bizarro-world NYT piece on the new kitchen gadgets.  For the price of nearly an entire Ikea kitchen remodel of my 7 ft x 8 ft kitchen (granted, only a low-end remodel), I could buy a Frigidaire oven with a chicken nugget button on it.  Can't find the nugget button?  It's right next to the frozen pizza button...  

While I am loving the time saving - and don't begrudge anyone the luxury of one more bedtime story or Uno game with their kids that the occasional batch of frozen chicken nuggets might afford - this is going too far:  too far into anyone's wallet let alone mine.  I am all for multi-use but the bottom line is the bottom line.

A $2000-$3000 appliance to cook Mc-food?  Are we all really having such trouble cooking up our chicken nuggets just so?  What is a "perfect chicken nugget", anyway other than a culinary oxymoron.

Isn't this the year that Julia Child made a comeback and sales of her bible/cookbook soared.  Are we all just using that tome as home decor, prestige pieces on the bookshelf or strategically placed next to the over-priced 6-burner oven or, perhaps, it is light reading while we distractedly cook perfect chicken nuggets with the push of a button?  ... What would Julia say?

Clearly, I have ruled out buttons-for-nuggets big-ticket appliances for my kitchen.  But I considered the smaller toaster ovens with the pizza "bump".  I use a toaster oven rather than a toaster already for it's multi-use flexibility.  And since we don't buy pre-sliced bread, and a toaster just gets our unevenly sliced Texas-sized chunks o' bread stuck and burnt, it's the practical choice for our household.  We don't like or use croutons enough to handle all that burnt toast.

But with a food allergy to corn in our household, I barely even have a frozen pizza I can buy that meets both the corn-free criteria and the taste buds of my used-to-mummy-made-food.  Trader Joe's cheese pizzas worked the last time I checked their ingredients but only if I add a lot more cheese to them and some other toppings.  I'm not sure these would fit into the bumped-out, pimped-out toaster ovens anyway.

I just turn on the regular, cheapo apartment-sized 24-inch oven, heat, and serve - poor, specialty-appliance-deprived soul that I am.

Eyeball it for yourself.  Do you see space on that counter for a designer Italian toaster oven with a "bump"?  Somebody else will have to buy those gadgets.  And they likely will, launching yet another Jack Donaghy into the premium appliance market stratosphere...

A guide to recognizing your springtime saints

My daughter just experienced one of the rites of AAPS 5th grade on Friday.  She went on her winter survival field trip.  She did, indeed, survive.

In the past, I've known kids who had considerably more wintery survival experiences on these outings in the bush north of Ann Arbor.  Sometimes wearing inappropriate footwear and/or bringing food that may never cook, those kids returned exhilarated, smokey and perhaps a little cold and hungry.

Not my girl.  Not this year.  Some great saint of spring was watching over these children from Pittsfield on Friday.  What a glorious day they had.  All fires going, all food cooked.  My daughter said she was in charge of grilling - that's my girl!  The oo-ing and ahh-ing over the food went on for days.  Oh, yeah.  That is my girl!

This got me thinking about my own winter survival efforts and the various, palpable markers I use to recognize the arrival of spring.   Food, cooking, and entertaining in my home tend to be at the heart of it.  If it wasn't for my bright, small-but-mighty kitchen and all the special occasion meals my girls and I cook up in it, I truly believe I would not survive.  If you've never seen it, it is quite small.  The floor space is 4ft by 5ft-ish.  The compact stove is to the right in this photo, the fridge is just to the left.  It's compact but powerful - the Mary Lou Retton of kitchens.

We celebrate any and all potential holiday dates, people, and events with some kind of special meal or party in my small Village indoor space.  And year after year, it works.  Amazingly, exhaustingly, it works.  We start out the fall with Canadian Thanksgiving and just never stop having a reason to tidy and clean the house, cook or heat up, as the case often is, eat and drink with friends.  In fact, I'm itching to have a party again.  It has been almost 3 weeks since our last dinner event...

But soon I can leave the confines of my kitchen behind and begin grilling whenever I please.  I can sense it already.  E's talk of grilling burgers - and the description of the kids eating them bite-by-bite - really got to me.  Simple, wonderful, grilled hamburgers...   Oooo...  Ahh...

I just have to wait for the foot of snow to melt in the backyard - a full northern-exposure enclave, sheltered from most of the day's sun by our home.  It gets only a slice of the morning sun.  I'll have to get out there and shovel it out.  There is so much hardened snow and ice on our deck right now - a 53 degree F, gorgeous day - I had to crawl outside the window by the deck to take this picture this morning.

By late February, I do tend to feel like I am hanging on to so very much by the tips of my fingers:  my budget, my waistline, my sanity.  After months of being cooped up inside, coping through food, friends and Netflix, I see light in early March when the bulbs pop up in my garden and the roads clear.

I can run again  - outside - and I actually want to run again.  Running outside helps me out all three ways - the road is cost-free to run, I trim down automatically, and I feel like myself again - body and soul.  I think more clearly, I feel more positive, and actually get more accomplished when I have that little daily run on the road back in my life again each spring.

Starting up again is as easy as walking.  I use a modified, shortened version of a Couch-to-5k Plan.  As a merely lapsed runner and not a totally new convert, I can get into it a little quicker and often can run the 5k on the first try after many months off.  But not always.  In those cases, I start over by walking, then adding as many steps of jogging (I don't think you can call my early pace actual running) as I can.  Then I walk again until my heart rate comes back down, I can breathe more easily, and I feel like I can do some more jogging.  I keep going like that each time until, eventually, I am running more than I'm walking.  In just a few of these, I can "run" the whole 5K or 3.12 miles.  I usually start this routine again just after a doctor's visit, getting a baseline on my overall health.  That usually offers the final incentive to get going on the road once again.

Although I discovered that the girls and I are too late to register for Shamrocks and Shenanigans 5k race this year, I started "training" for it almost 10 days ago now and could do it easily - if not quickly - but for the 5k registration being capped and full now.  No matter.  The running is back in my life again and the kids can still register to run the Kids Kilometer.  It's a fun event - check it out!  Downtown Ann Arbor is always packed for it and buzzing.   I will run my own 5k race on St. Patrick's Day instead to mark the occasion.  Others will undoubtably celebrate the saint in other ways...

One of the other things I look for after a long winter indoors, are the Passover items at Hiller's at Arborland.  We don't celebrate Passover but we take full advantage of the shopping possibilities and options.  I stock up on kosher products because they are corn-free.

The corn allergy in the house is a tricky one to negotiate.  My daughter has been a hivey mess for a while now.  The corn-free treats I pick up at the front of the store in their Passover display are lifesavers at this time of year.

And the four bags of Bazooka Joe kosher bubble gum is going fast, too!  I've been chewing gobs of it on my runs every day for a week.  This is literally blessed gum - and in its strawberry incarnation it is a powerful evocation of childhood, springtime bike rides around my hometown of Espanola.  But these cartoons are written in Hebrew.  I love it!  Yet another sign of spring...