I'm sorry about Lucky, Maria.

I made it through Tuesday only having to jettison mowing and laundry.

Yesterday wasn't too bad. I think tonight will be pretty full though. The weekend will be crazy busy. Once my wife's business is done getting starting, that will help a lot. I'm doing everything tech related with that plus furniture assembly and some other stuff like that. The house is getting bad again too. Sometimes I wish I could have the house to myself for a weekend so I could just clean it. It seems like I can get a couple of hours of cleaning in on the weekend and get a good head of steam going, but then someone will need me to do something and when that's done there's something else, and then something else, and I can never get back to it. It gets frustrating.

Gud, I'm legitimately confused: why doesn't your wife clean? What does the division of labor look like in your house?

Today is my Friday since I decided to take tomorrow off, which means I really need to get some stuff done today.

It's hard for me to figure that out since I sort of hop from task to task without really reflecting on the whole picture.

I do the cooking and when we do carry-out I'm almost always the person who picks it up. I do the vast majority of the grocery shopping. We both do laundry, and we both do dishes. I handle trash and recycling, mowing, auto repair, and household repairs. We both do vacuuming. I handle bills. She handles school issues and taking kids to appointments. She handles putting together pills into pill boxes. I handle everything technological. I tend to do more de-cluttering and filing and wiping things down.

Crap. I remember I told a recuriter he could call me this morning. I sort of hope he doesn't follow through.

Is there room in your budget to have a housecleaner come in, maybe even just once a month? That could free up some of the deep-cleaning time for you both.

Do your kids have chores? I was responsible for dusting and vacuuming on Saturday mornings by the time I was 10, maybe younger.

The kids have sporadic chores. Our daughter does her own laundry and our son will move toward that before long once he reaches the age when she started. Mowing will me moving toward them too. There is supposed to be a time on the weekends when they pitch in too, but often things will come up.

We are pretty random about division of chores here. Generally speaking the person who cooks doesn't do the dishes. Although they had better be cleaning up the prep mess as they go along. We all did our own laundry. With white tile floors, and pets, and 3 bathrooms, if I didn't have a cleaning person we would live in squalor.

DH takes care of the pool, but if I saw it getting a green tinge it would be my first instinct to pour some chlorine in there. I'd never get upset with him for neglecting it because he is as busy as I am. I generally do most of the grocery shopping, but if he finds something missing he goes and buys it. We cover for each other and just do the best we can with limited hours in a day.

I wish I could get my kids to more regularly do chores, but I find they have so much damned homework that it's really hard. Our usual routine is "Sunday morning chore time" and they rotate around a variety of tasks, but even that has fallen off lately because of homework (and soccer games.) Maybe this summer I'll regroup.

At my house, I do laundry (I love doing laundry), mr. flea takes out the trash and takes lead on everything pet related, I pay bills, mr. flea does car stuff. The place I do more than my share is the planning. I almost always make the weekly meal plan and grocery list, and, for example, I have done every single bit of the planning for 11 weeks of stuff to keep the kids cared for/active this summer.