Julia Roberts Does Not Clean Her Own Bathrooms

I'm cleaning 4 bathrooms today. I hate to clean my bathrooms and I have 4 of them. When I complain about having 4 bathrooms, I'm not secretly bragging "oohh look at me--my house is so big and fabulous that I have 4 bathrooms!". We have a 30 year old house that is still a bit too small and is in a constant state of remodel and repair. BELIEVE ME when I say I am NOT bragging.

We're not suppose to have 4 bathrooms. About 3 years ago we remodeled our house, to make it livable, and part of the remodel included adding a new master bedroom and bathroom to our upstairs. We already had one full bathroom upstairs, but it's pretty small and we use it for the boys. Our old master bedroom is now a playroom for the boys (before this playroom, my living room was the playroom. That was becoming a one way ticket to the looney bin for me) and we cut the old master bathroom in half. It is now a much smaller and the extra space is now a small office that Mike and I share. That office is home to The Knitting Queen's blog. The old master bath is currently in shambles--there is a huge hole in the ceiling because we had a leak from the new upstairs master bath, and we never painted the drywall or replaced the trim from the remodeling job 3 years ago.

That brings us to bathroom #4. We're on a septic system and our house is not zoned for 4 bathrooms. We know that and have always planned to gut our little powder room in the laundry room and turn it into a utility closet. When we got our permit we were told we can't have 4 bathrooms and we had long talks with our plumber about this (when we got our final inspection we took our plumber's "don't ask/don't tell" advice and just never showed the inspector that part of the house). It is truly our intent to remove that bathroom, but it means a new laundry room floor, and a utility sink, and repainting the laundry room, and new trim, and some cabinets, and it's right next to the kitchen and we need a new kitchen floor about as badly as a new laundry room floor, and I really want to paint our kitchen cabinets and get new hardware, and we REALLY need new counter tops and a sink, and, well, you get the picture...

So, I was cleaning all 4 bathrooms today and I got to thinking that Julia Roberts does not have to clean her own bathrooms. She may tell People Magazine she is just like the rest of us, but we know she's not. She may take care of her own kids, some of the time, and she may have simplified her life by moving to New Mexico, but we all know that Julia has a housekeeper. As much as Julia wants all of us to believe she is just like a normal person and she is so much more "real" than other Hollywood stars, there is NO WAY she scrubs her own toilet. Oh, Julia may wipe up the occasional spill, after calling the housekeeper who is on her way home after a long day of cleaning up after the Moders, and asking where the paper towels are again, but I guarantee that Julia never has to walk in to her kids' bathroom (which I'm sure is bigger than my entire master suite) and wonder how long it has been since it has seen a sponge while she begins to chisel toothpaste off the sink. All the while noting that the rest of the house will suffer because today is BATHROOM day.

Julia is so blissfully happy with motherhood because SHE DOES NOT HAVE TO CLEAN UP AFTER THEM. I could be blissfully happy with my kids and spend the entire day playing with them if that was ALL I HAD TO DO ALL DAY. I just sometimes have those thoughts while I'm living my own Hollywood-style life.

In knitting news, I'm plugging away at Gordon's hat:

And Cinderella's twin sister is coming along:

I have a long long list for the yarn store. I've been compiling it over the last several weeks. Mike--brace yourself--I need to arrange for some ME time (i.e. JUST me) and make a trip to the yarn store in the near future. For your sake, we might want to plan this sooner than later before the list gets any longer.