Domestic Diva??? I Think Not

Tomorrow will hallmark two domestic diva failures for me. It is the day of the great holiday cookie exchange at which I can almost guarantee I will be offering up store bought cookies unless some divine intervention appears in my kitchen before the morning. It is also the day that I finally cave and try to deal with my housecleaner situation and admit that I need at least weekly help.

The cookie failure is particularly irksome. I am currently working on batch number 3 of meringues, and they show only slightly more promise than batches one and two. Batch one did not even pretend to look like meringues should look, it was more of an egg white and sugar soup. Batch number two showed early promise, and then fell (literally). Batch number 3 made it into the oven, but at last peek only loosly resembled meringues in a "if you squint really hard and look slightly to the left" sort of way. I am currently debating if the 4th would be worth the effort or if I should just throw in the towel and head to the store after dropping C off at school tomorrow. It's a close call. Either way I need to go to the store as we are out of eggs, and when faced with the lovely looking store cookies or the potential of failing yet again, there is fairly good odds that I will cave to the powers that be. I should just admit that I cannot bake and move on.

On the housekeeper front, I currently have a lovely woman who comes every other week and does an adequate job of cleaning, a fabulous job of babysitting, and an above and beyond the call of duty job of catsitting when asked. In theory, I should be doing an equally adequate if not better cleaning the weeks that she does not come, in reality I will sometimes whip out the vacumn if the dust bunnies start rolling across the room.

I do not know how the Martha Stewart's and Bree's of the world do it. As I told M tonight, it is a good day if I can get all three of us dressed, cleaned, and fed. Dinner consists of a bagged salad and some sort of mystery meat most nights, and I couldn't even begin to tell you when the last time I pulled out the windex was. But the chaos is wearing me down, so I will throw in the towel and see if she can come every week. So much for being a SAHM saving us money...between the cleaning lady and the multiple batches of cookies, today has turned out to be pretty damn expensive.