Cooking or Cleaning?

I meant to write this post a few days ago... I guess better late than never.

I found an awesome system for keeping your kitchen clean: don't cook in it. No seriously, I frequently have a messy kitchen and have often wondered why I struggle so much with maintaining neatness in my kitchen. One factor against me (aside from the fact that I don't derive any inherent pleasure from doing dishes) is that I love to cook-- I mean really cook. Like making things from scratch, chopping tons of things on multiple cutting boards, making my own bread and side dishes kind of cooking. Not that I don't have my nights of frozen ravioli on a regular basis. But even if your meals consist of Costco potstickers (which mine frequently do), it only takes one or two times of not doing the dishes right away to find yourself with a big messy pileup. When you add chopping, sauteeing, mixing, and so forth to the mix, it can result in an instant pileup. So my kitchen is frequently messy because I am such a great cook. Right? Right???

I mean, look at this fabulous meal that I made the other night: Sausage Stuffed Acorn Squash with fresh steamed broccoli and Home-made Sun-dried Tomato Parmesan Bread. (Don't you love my kids' beautiful table setting, complete the Thomas Tank Engine centerpiece added by Jackson?)

OK, fine. Now I'm really just making excuses. The truth is that I am a project person and would rather work on my latest project of interest than diligently do my dishes and clean things up every day. It certainly doesn't help that the kids can get things messy way faster than I can possibly keep up- even just trying to keep up with the school papers that they dump everywhere seems daunting. So that's one of my main excuses. The other is that I'm an all or nothing person, so if I am not going to be able to get (or keep) my house 100% perfectly clean all of the time then why should I even start?

It's definitely something I need to work on and I have tried several times. How do you get into a good tidying/cleaning routine? I've tried flylady, and it worked reasonably well, but I basically cleaned all day to keep up with it. I want to have order but I don't want it to become an all-consuming obsession- especially because when I let cleaning and organization be my "project" of choice I often got frustrated when the kids (or, ahem, Dave) leave things out or aren't perfectly tidy. My house isn't disastrous, but I really just want things to be organized, neat, and tidy. I'm to the point where I'm almost ready to hire a cleaner, but that doesn't help so much with the "tidying" and "picking things up" part of cleaning. I'm working on teaching the kids to do more jobs, but that is a process and is often more work than doing it yourself.

For those of you who aren't so housecleaning-challenged, what do you do that works?

This is all starting to sound remarkably similar to one (or several) of my previous blog posts. I suppose it would probably help if I started by getting off of my blog and cleaning- instead of blogging about not doing it. ;) Or I could watch Addy smile and goo and make cute faces.