I believe (?) I can fly...

Passover is over. With it comes some sort of sadness, but this time it's not for the holidays that are over.

It's probably no secret to anyone who knows me or who reads this blog that my housekeeping is lacking and my standards are kind of low. Not terribly low - while working full time, we almost never eat take out, husband and children have clean clothes, dirty dishes are not piled up to the ceiling and the house is habitable- but not very high. Some chores get postponed for months if not years. I never feel this more acutely as before Passover. As most of my friends are busy spring cleaning, I settle for some mild form of decluttering and basically Pesach cleaning my living room, dining area and kitchen. I don't believe that Passover should necessarily equate to spring cleaning and have very good reasons for not doing it during that time. After all, I am an accountant by profession and the months of February through April happen to be pretty busy for us. However, with Pesach there are some deadlines that one must meet. When spring cleaning is done on one's own schedule, well, it kind of never gets done. At least in one shot.

So what's up with sadness? This Passover I made a commitment to 1) rejoin Flylady AGAIN and try to stick with it, 2) to keep my dining room table, kitchen counters and sinks clean at all times. Sounds like not that much, right? Only that I found myself washing dishes and wiping counters almost nonstop all the time. I mean it - except for the times when we ate/slept/went for a walk, ALL THE TIME. And that's only part of the kitchen and dining area! Towards the end of the last day, I gave up and left some silverware and cups unwashed. But I have done it all the other seven and a half days, and have housewife's eczema to prove it! The most annoying part? This kind of forced me to neglect kids' room a bit and when I walked in today, I found a mountain of clothes piled up on the rocking chair. How??? And in only two days???

That's when the sad realization hit me. Basically, if I want my house neat at all times (not just when kids are in bed and no one actaully appreciates semi-neatness), I will never be able to really rest or do anything other than clean. There will always be something else to do. And, while the house will most likely be much neater than now, working this hard is not a guarantee that it will be really neat. This doesn't sit well with me. At all.

So I am sad. And depressed. And finishing horrible Passover chocolate (it's Swiss, but the lowering of pure cocoa % actually makes it taste very cheap, though cheap it isn't) because tomorrow I am also starting Weight Watchers. And thinking that maybe my old self that didn't notice and/or wasn't bothered by disarray was better than the new/older me, at least for blogging and socializing purposes.

Ahh, I already miss holidays.