But I don't want your help

I'm a fairly structured person and I have a little chore around the house for each day of the week. As much as I love a clean house, I totally dread when Tuesday (house-cleaning day) rolls around. And it's not so much the cleaning part that I don't want to face, it's my two little "helpers" who insist on being involved in the process.

I know, I shouldn't complain. I am glad that my kids want to help, but at 4 and 17 months, their help is such a hindrance. If I had no assistants, I could get the house cleaned in just under two hours. But with them, the job seems to stretch out to fill the whole day. As soon as I pull out the cleaning supplies from the laundry room, Isaac goes under the sink and gets some sponges to help out. This morning he got so excited that he crawled into the cupboard to make sure he had every sponge out and broke a glass vase all over the floor.

Annie insists on letting me let her clean all of the windows with Windex, and I would probably be punched out if I cleaned the toilets and didn't let her do it. The main problem with delegating these two jobs to a four year-old is that I always have to redo them, and I can't do it when she's around or she'll be indignant that I didn't think her job was good enough. She's the same way when she helps me fold laundry (which also stretches out the job-time considerably), shrieking if she can't do something perfectly and getting mad at me if I straighten out her corners.

In my brain, I know that I can't squelch this helping habit. I want my kids to have good housekeeping skilz, especially the boys, who need to be trained early to be helpful. But it's such a test of my patience. I can't scream at the baby as he scoots a sponge soaked with pine-sol across the freshly washed floor. I even saved the toilets for Annie to clean when she got home from preschool today. When I was little I always felt like my mom wouldn't let us to do the housekeeping jobs until she was sure that we could do them up to her standards, and she checked up on us routinely (the "white glove" test). I hated it and it made me feel like I could never do it right, and I want my kids to be confident and like housework.

But that doesn't change the fact that on Tuesday mornings I'd much rather lock them in my bedroom with the tv tuned to Noggin and all the snacks they can eat. I'm sure that scraping squishy saliva-ed graham crackers out of my quilt and goldfish crumbs out of the carpet would be much less work than letting my helpers help me.

--originally published 3/21/06