Treating ourselves

So, as everyone knows - parents need a break sometimes.  And, I am gonna say it, ESPECIALLY foster parents.  Now, while I do mean they need things like a night out or an afternoon away from kids and stress, I also mean that everyone needs a break - they need to have something, or a break from something, that makes them happy and less stressed.  For us that break is cleaning.

Ok, so we are lucky.  Our bio sons have always spent one evening a week with their bio dad.  It used to be at our house and he would come over after work, play with them, bathe them & put them to bed.  It was great, we had a whole free evening, EVERY WEEK!  And then their dad started taking classes, so those days started taking place Friday nights.  Awesome!  Then we started fostering.  Now he still takes the boys, and they spend the night at his house because he recently moved one town over from us, but we still have 3 kids to entertain.  Bye-bye night off!  That used to be our big break.

But, just last week, for the first time, we started a new break.  We had a house cleaner come in. We are going to have someone come to our house one hour a week, every week, and clean.  We don't hate cleaning & we are not terrible at it, but man, it's time consuming and trying to clean around 5 kids is VERY difficult, especially when both parents work full-time jobs.We both feel anxious and overwhelmed when the house is a mess, even if it's neat but needs dusting and vacuuming (well, that's more me than Andrea, I might be slightly OCD). And if we don't have time to clean, we get annoyed and frustrated and feel guilty about not staying up all night to clean.  Plus, it turns out these folks are WAY better at it than we are.  And now the kids HAVE to clean their rooms, put all their laundry away, get their stuff out of common areas once a week (if not more, depending on how things pile up) or else their stuff gets tossed.  It hasn't happened yet, but we are only coming up on week two. We are also forced to straighten up our bedroom, bathroom and all of our junk too.  It's a great motivator. 

As we discovered last week, there is nothing more wonderful than coming home to a sparkling house that you didn't have to spend 6 hours cleaning while not spending time with your family.  It's an awesome feeling that we carried with us all week long.  Totally worth it.

Who is this person?  Not me!!