Sweating the Small Stuff

So I finally gave in and hired someone to clean for us. It's made a huge difference in my stress level . . . with work and caring for AC and keeping the household running, I'm always thinking about what I need to do next. You know, where you walk into a room and think, "Oh, that windowsill needs to be dusted" and then "I should put AC's folded laundry away now that she's awake, and then fill the basket with our dirty clothes and take it downstairs" and then "Man, I've been meaning forever to find a place to put those desk copies" and then "Oh, I need to remember to thaw some more frozen sweet potatoes for AC when I go back to the kitchen" and soon "What did I come up here for?"

It had gotten to the point that I was constantly feeling overwhelmed and scrambling to keep on top of things, and I felt like I needed to outsource teaching, caring for AC, or cleaning--and of that list, cleaning was the obvious thing to go. The woman we hired is friendly and cleans hard and fast--there's a lot of banging around--and she's thorough in some ways that I rarely get to, like polishing the sink each time, and so it's way better than I would have expected from a student or someone. On the other hand, of course, she is somewhat less uptight about things than I am (no surprise there), like cleaning the floors--I wash the floors thoroughly and always refill the bucket continually as the water starts looking dingy; she more just dampens the mop to get the dust and keeps going. But it's still a huge help in keeping things under control, and it's resulted in my just checking off a whole list of things under the category of "L will do that when she comes." So in that sense, it's great.

The one issue that has arisen is that we agreed she would come for three hours, and for the past two times, she's shown up over half an hour late. I don't want to be all Nanny Diaries, but it does seem like a big difference, considering that we didn't ask her to clean the basement bedroom and bathroom because we didn't want to ask her to do too much for the timeframe we had agreed on. I still would feel weird about saying, "Hey could you do this too" since I hadn't originally described it as part of the job, but I also feel a little annoyed if I do find things that she didn't do very well--and I definitely wouldn't feel that way if I felt like she had given us the full amount of time. Then I'd just figure, well, she did what she could. I mean, part of me feels like I should just be really grateful that she's cleaning my house, which I am, but which also makes it uncomfortable to complain. I don't think I am very comfortable with having staff (tee-hee).