Steve is back!!! :) It's so nice to have a whole family again. When he gets home I feel this tension that I didn't even know was there lifted off of me.

I've been feeling frustrated lately because our house is always a mess. Granted, I'm no amazing housekeeper, but the fault is mostly Emma's. She can take a spotless room and trash it in under three minutes. Today I was trying to get the house all clean for Steve's return, and she did her best to thwart my efforts. For example, I completely cleaned the kitchen. A minute later I asked her to go in there and throw something in the trash...one more minute later I went in to see what she was doing...the towel on the stove had been thrown on the floor, she'd removed about half the contents of the trash can and thrown them on the floor, plus my cookbooks were strewn about on the floor. The dogs were happily eating things that had been thrown out of the trash, namely used muffin cups, and spreading pieces all over the clean floor. Sigh. I don't know what I can do to have a cleaner house, besides clean it from top to bottom every night after Emma goes to bed. We all know that's not going to happen!

We have to be at some KPMG function tomorrow at 7:45am so I better be off to bed.