First, define your terms

[ailbhe]

We just got back. I'm about to cook dinner and then I have to tidy the house for the cleaners tomorrow. Turns out Rob defines "tidy" as "clear the floors and hoover," so the bit the hired help does is already done but the bit they don't do isn't, so I need to start in the bathroom so that at least that gets cleaned - they can't clean surfaces so covered in junk they're invisible, after all.

I am not crying. He has at least found Child Trust Fund paperwork and shoved it in a crate full of random paperwork, so I can sort that shortly and put things where they ought to go.

Dinner's going to be pasta and pesto, though. And I can't for the life of me work out where I am going to put the printer he acquired for us. It's huge.

Edit: I am far, far too tired, and Rob made Emer cry again, so I took the baby and he made pasta with half a jar of pesto, and the cleared the easily clearable bathroom surfaces. The rest can wait. If all I have to do during the week is keep the place tidy, then more rooms will get tidied and therefore cleaned in following weeks.

Linnea was an angel apart from one bout of toddleresque whinging on the trip home, and is now exhausted (two days of 6-hour-travelling, with a night of 9 hours' sleep in a single bed with me AND Emer in it too - poor baby). We met a five-year old who told me that crisps have salt in - "I know." "Then why are you eating them?" "Because I'm hungry," - and refused to accept the gifts Linnea drew for her on the grounds that they weren't proper drawings. She was a lovely five year old, but will be lovelier when she's learned some of the tongue-biting tactics that make for pleasant social interaction.

Comments

[nicolap.livejournal.com]

I always suspected I'd spend more time tidying up in readyness for the cleaner than I would save by them cleaning, if that makes sense. However, I'm sure there is a way to make it work, and it sounds like you know in your head which bits need tidied.

And having cleaned other people's houses to supplement my income, at various stages of my life, I can confidently say that many people think it is perfectly acceptable to expect the cleaner to clean up invisible surfaces... not nice though.

[ailbhe]

Oh - our paid cleaners just didn't.

[k425.livejournal.com]

We have Linnea's important bag, one bib and the instructions for the travel cot. I'm off work tomorrow and will encourage Jack to help write a thank you and help parcel everything up and then we'll enjoy a trip to the post office to return them all.

[radegund.livejournal.com]

Just as a data point, our intermittent cleaner moves stuff to clean surfaces, then puts the stuff back where it was (more or less - she consistently de-alphabetises the spices on the kitchen counter, and I consistently forget to tell her they're alphabetised).

She's a hyper-focus queen: she hoovers and mops, and then concentrates on one room (our choice) for the rest of the three hours. A couple of times I've asked her to optimise for breadth rather than depth, and she's gently refused. Mind you, she assured us when she started that once she'd got to every room once, it'd never really get that bad again. She was right.