Yep, I vacuum, after peeing of course. What, were you expecting some inspirational or motivational task that maybe you could add to your routine?

Sorry if so, but vacuuming should be a part of any household with pets and kids scurrying across the floor. I’ll admit, I was hair-phobic long before we had Avery and would vacuum almost every day already. But now that I’m at home, I feel it my duty to prepare the floors for Avery to crawl run around without collecting gobs of cat or dog hair in the process.

Seeing a cluster of hair whisk across our wood floors sends my already elevated cortisol levels through the roof! To ease everyone’s panic (i.e. just mine) I’m quick to bust out the vacuum for that one cluster and rid the house of its evil.

And then, even if I had just vacuumed, I might as well keep going “just in case” to make sure we’re safe. That is, until the cat comes out for food or our dog wags her tail.

I’m currently averaging a full vacuum twice a day with one first thing in the morning and another mid-afternoon. I don’t “get” to vacuum as much on the weekends because my wife yells at me for being too obsessive. What? Me, OCD? Nahhhhh. Okay, Yahhhhh.

Admittedly, the second one is partly for the crumbs I dropped while cooking meals for all of us and from Avery spitting her food out. Sometimes, pretending she’s a kitty doesn’t even get her to keep the food in her mouth!

Either way, one of the animals, real or pretend, create a need for me vacuum a second (sometimes even a third or fourth) time for the day. I can’t pinpoint exactly when my aversion to pet hair started since we used to have a husky named Rocky who would sit on the couch with us and I was just fine. Loved that dog……and our cat, Gus.

I think it began around the same time I started getting really into healthy food choices and cooking more instead of going out to eat. Handling food more often means I need to keep my hands clean and free of hair, so it only seems logical. At least to me it does.

Anyway, most mornings I start my day with a nice run of the vacuum to capture loose hair, litter, food, and whatever else lays in the path of the almighty vacuum!

After that, Avery has a wonderfully clean floor (yeah right) to run around on as I go about doing my second (and third and fifth) thing I do every day; cook. The fourth being exercise, duh.

Do you have a daily routine/habit/OCD tendency?

How do you feel about pet hair? My mom (G-Ma) and Kelley are just fine with it, so I’m alone with this aversion around here.