I wish I were better at the housewife thing.

I wish I were better than I am. I know what I want to do, but I can't ever seem to remember to do any of it, or find the motivation to. I envy people who wake up with a full to-do list in their head and then just commence doing it. Me, I can't even remember the date, and I keep trying to check my watch for it when I haven't worn a watch that gave the date in almost 20 years. Here are just a few things I want to do, but never seem able to.

I want to plan meals out ahead of time, so that I'll actually have all of the required ingredients, or maybe just have the food thawed. I would love to go to the grocery store and buy all the things, and only the tings, I need to make specific meals for the week. But I just end up buying the things I wrote on the grocery list, which means the things we have run out of during the week. Unfortunately that means that I often don't have enough of an ingredient because I haven't yet run out to buy more. I need a cup of parmesan to make pesto sauce, so as long as I have half a cup left I forget to buy more and can't eat pesto sauce.

I want to vacuume twice a week. I even wrote out a schedule where vacuuming was listed twice. But then Tuesday came around and the floors looked fine, and the baby needed lunch and then Ryan came home and I had to get on her about her homework, and then it was time to figure out what I could make for dinner with nothing thawed out and only half a pantry of stuff, so it got put off. Vacuuming is just so easy to put off!

I want to be the sort of mom who remembers every week to go through the house and empty the various trash cans on garbage day, but I am not. I end up with a waste basket overflowing with multi-colored lint beside the washing machine and a can in the bathroom with empty cardboard tubes sprouting out the top, the day after the trash gets picked up.

And while I'm at it, my potholders are filthy. I want to somehow be able to remember on laundry day to go through the house and collect all the rag rugs and potholders and wash them too, but I never do. I barely ever remember to go get the week's bibs from the kitchen.

How do other people remember to do all these things? Is it that they had more organized mothers themselves? Is it a role model thing? Or is it just some ingrained character flaw that I don't think to dust any higher than I can see or to clean off the tops of my ceiling fan blades? What exactly is wrong with me that I don't know to do these things?