Go Tell Aunt Rosie

Don't you love it when you title a blog post and then realize YOU HAVE THE WRONG WORDS???

Welcome to my Wednesday.

Allow me to back up, if I may.

I feel it is an appropriate time to mention, especially after yesterday's post on my occasional housewife failures, that I am actually not the best housekeeper in our marriage. I am a good housekeeper. I keep the clutter picked up, I do the laundry, I empty the dishwasher, and I'm pretty sure the health department wouldn't kick up too much of a fuss if they visited. But if we're in the business of truth-telling here, I must confess that Ryan is a MUCH better housekeeper than I am. He is better at cleaning {probably because he is not so ever-loving FREAKED OUT by unidentified dirt}, and he is motivated to tackle these projects far more often than I am.

It's an area of life I've had to come to grips with since being married. My choices are to feel like a failure because I'm not as good at this as he is, or accept that I'm not as good at this as he is and let it be okay, because if he's not worried about it, I probably shouldn't be either.

Most of the time, I choose the second option.

So keeping that in mind, may we pause for just a moment to talk about our vacuum? When we got married, we owned many things in duplicate. This happens when you have two thirty-somethings who marry and combine their fully functioning households. Our general rule was to compare the things we owned in duplicate and keep the nicer option. And in the event that we hated both options, we put that item on our registry.

This worked very nicely, except in the case of the vacuum. I owned what I felt was a fairly nice vacuum. It was probably less than ten years old, it was sturdy, easy to manage, and I had mastered the delicate art of changing the bag when it got full. It wasn't a masterpiece of a vacuum. It wouldn't star in a commercial for being the coolest kid on the block, but it worked well.

Ryan actually owned two. And I'm pretty sure both were original prototypes of vacuum cleaners. Sometimes a picture is worth a thousand words, and this is one of those times. So I am going to skip all description and just show you.

You guys?

I HATED THEM BOTH. The blue one wasn't so bad if you had a specific project: a closet or a car to clean. But it wasn't practical {or lightweight} to cart around the house, so that left the maroon vacuum. That thing is as loud and unwieldy as you might imagine, and Ryan loved it. The vacuum hill was one he was willing to die on in the combination of households, so my ultra-modern, kinda-cool vacuum went to a new home, and old blue and old maroon moved in...in all their loud, croaky, 1970's leftover glory.

I probably don't need to really explain why I didn't vacuum with intense frequency, do I? For me, using these vacuums required a mental preparation, and I didn't get there nearly as often as I should have.

Sooooooooooooo...a couple of months ago, Ryan decided to pre-spend his Christmas money and get one of those little robotic vacuums that works all by itself.

I did not care at all because, well, OBVIOUSLY this was going to make my housewifery life much easier. And it was his Christmas money. If he wanted to buy a vacuum, more power to him. But I sort of wondered in the back corner of my mind just how pathetic it made us that we had to have a robot vacuum our house. Had I found a new all-time low as a housewife failure?

He named her, because we name all our stuff, and this is how she came to be known as Rosie. {Apparently that was the name of the housekeeper on the Jetsons. I never watched the Jetsons, so I don't have any idea.}

I mentioned Rosie in passing a couple of weeks ago on the blog and had some questions about her, so I thought I'd answer them for you.

Rosie is about the size of a large dinner plate, and she's probably about 2-3 inches tall. She's programmable, so every day at the assigned time {7:30 a.m. for us}, she sets out from her charger and begins looping about the house in random patterns, sucking up cat hair, litter, dust, Bekah-hair, and whatever other odd assortments of dirt have come in during the past 24 hours. She pokes around in every single room, regardless of the surface {she does work on carpet, tile, and hardwood}, and she finds hidden dirt and eats it.

Because she's little, she can get under pieces of furniture that a handheld vacuum would not be able to maneuver. {Bookcases, couch, etc.} If she runs into something, she just rotates and goes another direction. Her one vice is eating cords, and if she gets too choked up on one, she just stops working and dies. {I can't blame her there.} When I find her and untangle her, I just turn her back on, and she continues on her merry way.

Her goal every day is to make it back home to her charger with her belly full of dirt. Most days she does, but now and then, I find her conked out in the bedroom, too tired to make it home. {Can't blame her there either sometimes.}

Because we're weird this way, one of the highlights of our day is examining the dirt pouch and seeing what she found every day. Ryan usually empties it when he comes home for lunch, and Rosie sleeps in her charger all day so she can be ready for the next day.

Call us crazy, call us spoiled, but we really love our Rosie. I admit it is SO NICE to have floors that are not littered with cat hair every single day. It's nice to not carry cat hair on my socks everywhere I go. It's nice to know that people can come over whenever, and our floors at least look clean. And it's nice to have an electronic babysitter for Braeya every morning. {Braeya HATES Rosie, but she stalks her anyway.}

We kept the other two vacuums so we can actually hand-vacuum the house as needed {after a party, for example, or if there's a specific spill}, but I do NOT miss using loud, cranky maroon. Not one bit.

We call Rosie a good investment.

And back to my opening statement...

When I heard that her name was Rosie, it made me think of the scene in Little House on the Prairie when Laura, Mary and Carrie sang the song about going to tell Aunt Rosie that the old gray goose is dead. I sing it every time Ryan talks about Rosie. And when I went to get the clip so YOU could watch it too, I learned it's not Aunt Rosie at all. It's Aunt Rhodie!

Oops.

Well, from now on, in Shafferland, it's Aunt Rosie and the old dead gray goose.

{PS - Our Rosie is an iLife, if you want to read more specifics about it at your leisure.}