A clean apartment is nice..

One of the things that stress me out the most is the fact that my husband, bless his heart, is completely oblivious to any mess around him. He makes them, but when I comment on it, his response is usually: "huh? oh, sorry."

This is because he is the product of a home where his mother did everything for him. Seriously. He lived at home until he was 26 and she was still going into his room and making his bed and cleaning it up. At first I thought it was a cultural thing since he is Chilean, and it probably is, but I didn't realize how detrimental it was going to be to me when we got married.

I've always been a laid-back person, not naggy, but I have turned into a huge nag over household issues. As it stands now, I do everything from cleaning to cooking to making his lunch for the next day. It gets tiring and very frustrating to continually ask something of someone and they don't do it. I'm sure everyone already knows this.

However, one of my goals was to stop nagging. I realize that if I want the house a certain way, then I'm going to have to rely on myself to get it done. It's hugely unfair, but I realize as I get older that it's not worth the stress and anxiety it causes. I hope that if I make a habit of picking up around here consistently then he will notice and start to form a habit on his own. I will, of course, still request in a nice way that he do things, but I'm just going to stop there.

So today, I took about an hour and straightened everything up, loaded the dishwasher, dumped trash, etc and he noticed. He may not have gotten up and helped, but at least he said: "Thank you." Honestly, if he didn't help me one bit but was thankful for all the hard work I put in to making our place nice, clean, and making him food and doing his laundry......I don't think I'd mind as much.

Oh. Also, for my style resolution, I actually made some tiny headway today. Our bedroom has been kind of a mish-mash of miscellaneous furniture since we moved in together. I wanted a bit more of put-together looking there, so I went out and used my IKEA gift cards and picked up a few things. I got a new quilt cover, not the one I originally wanted, but it's still nice. I also got some bedside tables that matched and are just lovely! I also bought some frames and put 2 pictures from a japanese woodblock calendar in them.

I really have been moving toward fresher, cleaner colors lately--you know, the whites and lights, but since the major pieces in our room are dark and we bought black frames to match those japanese pictures, I figured I'd try the darker color scheme for now. Doesn't have to be forever, right?

Right.