Chinese Food for Everyone Take 2

I hired a housekeeper to visit our home once a week.

Once a week, she asked? Are you sure?

It seems once every two weeks or once a month is the norm, but really...yes, once a week, I desperately pleaded. Please fit my home into your schedule. I

Since returning to work and moving into a house, I realized the only way that this whole 2 working parents, no daycare, thing would work is if we outsourced most everything but the kid. I needed someone to hit the reset button on our house once a week.

So it was great confidence I felt I could host a Sunday afternoon dinner party for 5 adults and 2 kids. After all, what could possible go wrong? The house would be clean. We'd have all day Saturday for errands and grocery shopping. We'd make our famous gourmet risotto and lemon bundt cake.

You get where this is going...anything that could go wrong short of someone ending up in the hospital or dying (though the ER almost did come into play when I slammed the car door on my husband's hand). At 9 AM on Saturday, our gorgeous framed engagement photo that made us look young glamorous came crashing down on the floor into a million smattered pieces. Luckily, Baby wasn't around. At 9 PM, Husband drove over a sample jar of paint and now our driveway looks like it was attacked by graffitti artists. I choose not to remember anything in-between other than the whole family breaking down in the distant suburbs sometime during the afternoon.

Sunday wasn't much improved. Guests were to arrive at 3. At 2:54, Husband was texting me to say the store didn't carry the Arborio rice needed for risotto.

Plan B! I decided. Chinese food delivery for everyone!

I knew it would all be ok. The house was still clean. Sometimes, in the life of domestichood, that's all that really matters.

Suspended leftovers in time

I am eating leftover Chinese food in the dark, watching the the sun begin its slow ascent over the hills behind the bay. It seems its daytime somewhere else, but maybe still time for more sleep here. Not for me. It's one of the 2 days a week I commute to corporate headquarter. A long, intense drive away from here...through winding roads around the hills at 80+ mph and sudden stops in areas of low-lying fog and dense traffic. Even at 80 mph, cars pass me going 90. Everyone has so far to go so early in the morning.

My baby is cuddling with his daddy. I tried to feed him...wanting the nursing to last as long as possible. Make it to 6 months, the doctore demand. I want to make it to a year, but I'm not sure if getting to 5 months is even possible. The baby barely suckled this morning and I'm not exactly dripping with milk. Do I even bother taking the breast pump to the office this morning?

Chinese Food for Dogs

Yesterday was the day after the New Year. Husband, baby, dogs and I went ventured out to the suburban Home Depot to see if we could afford to retile the guest bathroom as a stopgap to gutting the entire thing until our bank account recovers from actually buying our new mostlikelyamoneypitold house. The short answer? Not really. Too much of everything needs to be replaced which would affect the tiling and the tiling is too expensive to rip it back out in a couple of years.

Damn Home Depot for making tiling installation sound so cheap until you start putting in all the add-on costs like ripping out the old floor. And damn Husband and I for having expensive tastes in everything. We would rather let our bathroom look like cat vomit under a leaky shower than put in crap. Or...what we would consider to be crap and most of America would consider to be just fine and no we are not part of the 1% or we would have hired an interior decorator and contract company and renovated the whole house before we moved in. Actually, we wouldn't have bought this house but one that is already nice.

But yes, we are grateful to be able to afford the house at all.

Grumpily hungry, we returned to the city and stopped by the nearest Trader Joe's to stock up on food. We have one car and my office is many lightyears away from our house with no convenient public transportation between the two. This means Husband and Baby are car-less for much of the workweek, so we try to keep the fridge full.

But Trader Joe's was closed on New Year's. This means that on the day after New Year's, there was a line to the lines at TJ's. And grumpy and hungry Family would never stand in a line to get to the lines for something so plebeian as grocery shopping. What were we to do?

Chinese food for everyone, I say. Order enough for 3 days.

And the dogs? Husband asks. Even they have no food.

Order them Chinese food too.

And now Black Doggy is staring at me wanting here Kung Pao Chicken for breakfast.