I’m fighting a losing battle against clutter and toys and dirty laundry and dog hair. The mess in my house is making me claustrophobic; I feel in real danger of it swallowing me right up. I simply can’t clean fast enough to keep up with the disorder created by the rest of the people/animals living here. Lately I feel like I’m living for the ten minutes here and half-hour there that I can sneak away to sweep the floor or sort the recyclables, and let me tell you, that’s no kind of life.

Much of the problem–and this applies to my entire life, not just to housekeeping–is that we have no routine. The only constant is that Lydia goes to school Monday through Friday and watches The Simpsons at eight o’clock on weeknights. Everything else, from mealtimes to bathtimes to working hours to bedtimes, is completely up in the air. There are days that Tage is up until three in the morning then sleeps past noon. Most days I go back to bed after I’ve gotten Lydia off to school and often stay there until lunchtime. Olof works all hours of the day and night, pretty much every day of the week. Our schedule is so wholly out of whack that I’ve begun to despair of us ever getting ourselves back on track.

At least once a week I get out a clean sheet of paper and meticulously plot out a line-up for our days, from getting up (and staying up) at 7:30 to going to bed at 11, with regularly-scheduled meals in between, but such order never comes to pass. We’re such creatures of habit, and so embarrassingly lazy at that, that it’s easier just to continue with the status quo and deal with the consequences (e.g. days that seem to end before they’ve really even begun and a pre-schooler who gets his second wind some time after 10pm). We so need Supernanny to come in here and whip us all into shape.