If you are so lucky to have family nearby or dear friends...
maybe you can all do a "make-over-my-house before baby get's here" DAY.
You could cook up some food and everyone could pitch in and help clean and organize.

also, maybe at your baby shower or blessing you could pass around a sign up sheet
asking people to pick a day to come help you w/ the house after the baby arrives.

Another thought-- get your husband to do more!

and/or Is there something you could trade/ barter to get a house cleaner every now and then??

good wishes!
It's NO easy job being a SAHM!!

I've got to pipe and say this is the time to call on friends. You know how, when you're pregnant or have just had a baby and people ask you what you need? Tell them you'd love it if they can come over and clean your bathroom. Or do a load of laundry. Or help organize the kitchen. Or come and watch the toddler for a while so you can get an hour to yourself or a nap.

If you're like me, it's hard to ask for help. But people *love* to do things like this. It's what you need and you also may get some hang out time too.

Almost two and half years after my daughter's birth, I'm still perilously behind. But that little bit of assistance here and there from friends helps tremendously.

Good luck!

If you can't get help, choose a small area to concentrate on. (Choose an area in the room you spend most of your waking time in.) Keep this small area clean and move on adding another small area when you can. I also found that flowers can make a huge difference. If you can clear the table and keep flowers in an old jar the whole house feels nicer.

It also helps me to change my mindset and not see the mess as my biggest priority. I say to myself "People before things." It's been a helpful mantra for me. Happiness is NOT a clean house.

Hey - everyone has great advice, but I just wanted to add something. What helped me was getting rid of alot of the extra stuff.

We are trying to sell our condo - it's way too small for my family (me, my husband, our babe, my younger sister, a 90# golden retreiver and a cat). The first thing the realtor said when she toured it was that it looks way too cluttered and anyone seeing it would assume that it was too small based on the amount of stuff we had packed into it. So we rented a storage locker and started packing it with things we didn't need everyday. Kitchen items, clothes, books, toys, extra furniture, etc. And the condo is so much better now! It is so much easier to keep clean. It has really been a big eye-opener for me. it has made me rethink about all of the 'stuff' I hold onto. I just have so much crap! And I don't need it. It just gets in the way and creates more messes.

When we finally sell and get a bigger place, I can guarantee that not everything in that storage locker is making it back.

Anyway, I'm not saying that you are as much of a packrat as I am (seriously, five giant bookshelves full of books? Like there are no libraries nearby? I really need that many books???) but it might help to go through and make sure you really need all of the things that are creating clutter.

Maybe not get rid of them right away - just store them in boxes that are not easy to get to and see if you can live without them.

I third the minimalist approach. Our public areas of our house are wide open just because we can sweep up dog and cat hair in minutes. The other thing that helps us is not having a washer and dryer...I know, you think I'm crazy but my husband takes our laundry that we sorted the night before to the laundromat every Wed after work and her is home in two hours. We do cloth diapering and we just keep the diaper pail outside to avoid the smell all week and he just chucks them into the machine with the detergent and a spoonful of oxyclean each week and out come fresh diapers, much whiter and smelling better than a home machine can do. That's it...all laundry done in two hours, just have to put them away that night and our daughter loves that ritual because she has been doing it almost every Wed of our lives. Putting away doesn't always get done and that really mounts up into a mess of digging through bags so we try to keep on track with that one thing.

The other thing we try to keep up with is going to bed with a clean kitchen. I was flipping through a book at the dance school I taught at many years ago and there was a passage on good dietary habits to get into and cleaning your kitchen at night was one. Their reasoning was that you went to bed with a clean conscience for many reasons: the obvious is that you are happy that you actually gone to bed achieving at least one thing that day, next was that running water, warm suds and quiet are meditative and you actually fade to sleep faster if done immediately before bed and the dietary part was that knowing that you are waking up to a clean kitchen makes you more likely to go in there and fix a healthy breakfast because you are not worrying about if the dishes you need are clean, that you can't get to the counters and you know that it is a pleasant place to walk into. All that passage said was true, we try to keep up with it because the other option is standing in the kitchen all drowsy, groaning and reaching for the cereal each morning.

I do have to admit that my husband fully participates in housecleaning, cooking and childcare and is bewildered that any man would not participate in his home. My other admission is that we barely have what people would consider a clean house, it smells like dog, we have animal fur on all the furniture and it is rarely a place that the posh parents we met in mommy and me yoga wanted to hold a playgroup again. Just having a few things that we know always happens keeps us that much farther away from living in a hovel.

Try www.flylady.net. She's my lifesaver when it comes to housekeeping. She knows how to make it doable without seeming overwhelming. She's also FREE.

metro paints are cheap and you can mix colors yourself! They even have a handy guide! And a fresh coat of pain makes a room feel better, and you have to clean the room to paint it and get rid of stuff along the way...

Hope that helps. Its been awhile since the first post so now you have two kids no?

giving myself a time-out~~time alone to rest my thoughts, and carry that over to paper. notebooking is key for everything in my life. lists and lists of lists. writing it down just gets it out and organized in some other space where i can visit and it will stop overwhelming me. when i feel like you feel, i just need a long space of time to myself to regroup. maybe even create a sacred space for my*self