Maid-free weekends

Jenalyn lives in with us Mondays-Fridays. She comes in early on Monday, and goes home in the afternoon on Friday, depending on what's going on. Sometimes early, sometimes after an evg of babysitting. She keeps herself amazingly busy during the week, both with housework and sharing with childcare. We decided to have maid-free weekends for two reasons. 1) Because she asked for weekends off (even though the norm here is 6-day weeks) and 2) We decided that we needed to stay somewhat realistic about our family life. Having househelp is fabulous, but very much a priviledge that we don't want to take for granted.
At the weekends, we do laundry, but that's pretty much it. Our apartment gets messy. We leave the girls toys exactly where they have landed. (mostly). The beds don't get made. We just pull the sheet up when we hop in the next night. We leave the washed dishes un-put-away until they need to be used again. And ZERO cleaning gets done. The funny thing is, this is exactly how we live in New Zealand! I never really "did" beds - what's the point with a duvet that just needs pulling up? And the dishwasher would usually get un-loaded only when necessary. And cleaning got done just when it seemed REALLY necessary.

We've had three maid-free weekends like this so far, and all seemed well, till last night (Sunday night). In the middle of the night, I asked Nigel to get me a glass of water from the kitchen (he was up anyway). Well, what a commotion! He came back a bit weary and said "Be glad it wasn't you who got the water". Aparently, when he turned the light on, he spotted a VERY LARGE cockroach scuttling to safety. He managed to win the ensuing battle, but he came back muttering that "that thing did NOT crawl in from the drains" (All the other cockroaches we've seen so far have been little ones (in retrospect, anyway!) on the bathroom floor, near the drains, and after 3 days of Jenalyn working for us, we hadn't seen anymore).
SO. We told Jenalyn the story, and she spent a large amount of time today scrubbing the kitchen floor, all the surfaces and all the cabinets with bleach. There is not a single germ in there, and I'm sure that's how she's been keeping us critter-free the whole time. What seems 'excessive' cleaning from my NZ perspective is actually really kinda 'necessary' cleaning here.

Are we going to change the way we do our weekends? Well, I'm going to give the stove and benchtops that EXTRA wipe down after use. And I think I'm going to make more of an effort to actually put away the dishes after they've been washed. Because if there ARE night visitors, I'd rather they not dance on my clean plates.