January « 2009 « American Family

Year of the OX!

This weekend was a big one at our house. We had two different Chinese New Year events.

The first was a CNY party at a friend’s house. The majority of the families there were adoptive families, but all but one family had a parent who was Chinese (ok, mostly it was the moms who were chinese except for our family where it was the dad). We had a great time making jiaozi and then we ate a huge Chinese feast. The gluttonous kids snatched up all their hongbao and spent the evening running around like sugar-crazed maniacs (the sugar was mostly from the chocolate money in the hongbao).

On Sunday, I overcame a huge personal hurdle and cooked CNY dinner for Mr. A’s family. In the past, I have refused to ever cook anything Chinese for anyone who is actually Chinese for good reason. That reason being my Chinese cooking sucked. But this year, I have actually learned to cook it much better with the help of two excellent cookbooks.

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We made several varieties of jiaozi (steamed & fried / with cabbage and without), Mr. A’s famous long-life noodles, tofu and a veggie dish. Mr. A’s sister brought the homemade mochi and the meat. I also made steamed banana cake (which is not chinese at all. It is vietnamese but oh so yummy, so I made it anyway.) If I must say so myself, it was a pretty decent and edible spread.

Here is Mr. A’s dad making jiaozi for the first time ever. We asked if he ever helped make them in Taiwan and his answer was “No! Boys do not do that!”

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Here is a picture of L and M in their new year’s clothes. M didn’t get a “chinese” outfit this year for her dance class so she is wearing a new red shirt and her birth-year gold jewelry (outfit and accessories chosen by M herself). L’s shirt isn’t new, it is a Chinese hoochi mama shirt that MIL gave M a long time ago, but L likes to wear for dress up. She chose it (with a more than a little encouragement from M.)

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We also made the girls and their two cousins bow for their hongbao. (I was video taping, so no photos this year.) We threw firecrackers and did our now-traditional lion dance. (This is L shaking her caboose.) We also lit incense and burned ghost money for the ancestors.

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All in all, we had a great Chinese New Year this year. Because Mr. A’s family didn’t do much of the this stuff when he was little (cleaning the house, new clothes, etc.), we have been creating our own traditions for the girls. The first couple years we did it, it felt a little weird. Now that we have done it for a few years, it feels comfortable.

Hooray for the Year of the Ox! I hope it is a lucky one!

Xin Nian Kuai Le!

cleaning (continued)

I have to say, the comments on that last post made my weekend. On some level, I knew most people do not keep their homes spotlessly clean all the time. I have seen it with my own eyes many times.

But still, my biggest concern about the state of my own house’s cleanliness is mostly related to what other people will think of me if they know our house gets messy.

That’s crazy, right? Because the vast majority of the times I see other people’s houses kind of messy, I don’t think anything bad about them. As a friend and I were discussing last week, it actually makes me feel pretty good to see other people’s messy homes. It makes me feel like I am normal.

And yet, my subconscious insists on clinging to this stupid anxiety around my messy house. It just goes to show how much I internalized some of my mom’s issues when I was growing up. Before company would come over, my mom would go CRAZY cleaning the house. Crazy enough that my sister, dad and I would try to find any excuse not to be home. My mom also had some social anxiety issues, as well as a need to prove she was good enough (which I believe was overcompensating for the fact that she had me when she was a teenager).

Both my sister and I have similar anxiety, though mine is the least of all of us. For that matter, I believe all my mom’s sisters get anxious and need to have spotless houses when they have company too. I suspect it is partly inherited and partly learned. But really, in the grand scheme of all possible inherited neuroses, these are not so bad.

In general, our house probaby averages around a 6. On bad days it probably goes as low as a 4 or 5. If I could keep it an 8, I would be much less stressed about it. I know that I am never going to be enough of a perfectionist to reach a 9 or a 10. Deep down, I am just too lazy and while I care, I don’t care that much.

So thanks again for sharing. Seriously, most of you made me feel much better. And the rest of you with really, super-clean houses, well, I am envious of the environment but not the work.

Coming up soon: Chinese New Year, pass or fail?

I am not the world’s best housewife.

A few months ago, in preparation for our newly reduced income, we canceled our cleaning service. I know, I know, the world’s smallest violin is playing songs of sadness for my incredible personal hardship.

Since then, we have been struggling to get back into the cleaning groove. It is not going particularly well.

The cleaning people came every other week and did a thorough top to bottom cleaning. That meant that ever two weeks, we had to make sure we cleaned up all our clutter. Without the pressure of someone else coming in to clean, we are finding it much harder to motivate ourselves to clean up everything all at once. It also doesn’t help that our efforts are largely in vain if the children are home, because they follow behind us leaving a trail of detritus in their wake.

Also, my own personal deep cleaning does not appear to be as clean as the cleaning team’s was and things seem to get dirty again faster than before. Or maybe I just notice it because I am the one who is cleaning it up now. Actually, I am sure I am noticing more due to the increased frequency of arguments Mr. A and I have had about dumb cleaning issues in the past month.

I really want the house to be clean. I get quite testy when it is messy, not to mention how crazy it makes me when it is actually dirty. Unfortunately, no one in our house seems to be prone to perfectionistic cleaning, so we are left with my best efforts. I confess, by “best effort”, I really mean a mediocre effort that lasts only until I get bored and want to do something else.

I even got a book from the library, hoping it would show me where I am lacking. I never knew how very badly I suck at housekeeping until I skimmed the first quarter of this book. I mean, it is 837 pages long! I don’t know why I thought I would find the answer to a spotless house in 10 minutes a day in there.

Right now, our typical daily cleaning includes the following: picking up toys (all freaking day long), breakfast dishes , lunch dishes, superficially clean up dinner mess and do dishes, clean up toys AGAIN. If we ate something with lots of crumbs, we sweep under the dining room table. Occasionally, if it is really yucky, I will also use the broom on the kitchen floor.

Otherwise, I leave most of the rest of the cleaning (bathrooms, kitchen, vacuuming, dusting, mopping) for the every other week big cleaning. I do the entire week’s laundry every Sunday night. I probably change the sheets once a month, if that.

When I was growing up, my mom had real issues around people seeing our house messy. On some level I really believed that we should be ashamed of our substandard housekeeping, though I now suspect we were really comfortably in the normal range. Some of that anxiety still lingers for me, though, and I half-believe other people are out there living in spotlessly clean houses.

So here is my question, are you really doing more than just straightening up on a daily basis at your house? If you were to be completely honest and rank your average house cleanliness on a scale of 1 to 10, where would it fall?

Year of the OX!

cleaning (continued)

I am not the world’s best housewife.

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