I remember it like yesterday. Waiting for Mom’s “Country Woman” magazine to arrive in the mail. I would sit on the couch in our living room carefully reading the entire magazine from front to back. Making sure that I didn’t miss a single word or picture caption. We lived on a farm in North Dakota and our small town didn’t have much of a library, so a 6 year old’s reading options were limited to whatever books we had at home. Fortunately, my Mom loved to read as much as I did and besides a nice little collection of books, she had subscriptions to “Country Woman” and “Farm and Ranch”.
Each “Country Woman” would start out with an article featuring a farm woman and her wildly, over-the-top, floral festooned, country kitchen. I remember a lot of kitchens that also featured chickens and cows with an occasional vegetable theme here and there.
After that article there was one showing the winner of the monthly “Maid for a Day” contest. One lucky subscriber would win a maid to come clean her house while she lounged around drinking lemonade, eating cookies, and reading “Country Woman”.
Every month I would pray that my mom would be the lucky winner. Not for her sake, for mine. I never once thought that she would like a break from the endless house cleaning, cloth diaper washing, and garden weeding. I wanted a break. The thought of someone else vacuuming, dusting, and washing windows while I sat around eating and reading sounded like the most wonderful thing in the world to me. Of course, it never crossed my mind that I was sitting around reading instead of cleaning anyway.
Somehow my mom never won and I always secretly thought that the “Country Woman” people knew that we used cloth diapers and honestly, who wants to wash those?
Yesterday I was reminded of this memory when I was vacuuming and I realized that I finally had a solution. I have children!
Jackson even used the hose – something I’m not so good about doing.
That quickly moved to hosing his shirt
which quickly moved to hosing his hair.
Maybe I’ll wait a few more years before I let my “maid” help with the vacuuming again.
I was laughing out loud at the end of this post. The progression of pictures were so cute!!
Ahh, Country Woman! What memories.
That is too cute! Enjoy them wanting to help while you can, when they get to be the age that mine are at, they whine & procrastinate as much as they can!!! Then yelling starts (from me) & it takes 3 times as long as it really should have!!!!
aahahahahaa…
I also laughed quite hard. I remember being worried that if mom did win the maid-for-the-day they would not come on cleaning day. What do you do then? Tell them to come back another day? On another note, remember when we moved to Fergus and they had a huge library? Oh stacks of Nancy Drew how I remember you!