Today is national Take Your Kid to Work Day. Naturally, I began thinking what this day means to me, as a full-time homemaker. Oprah is fond of saying that stay-at-home moms have the “hardest job in the world.” Of course she is well-familiar with her demographic and her viewers, so it is a wise thing for her to say. It gets thunderous applause and vigorous head-nodding. But not from me.

As a stay-at-home mom, I disagree with her. It is not the hardest job in the world. I believe the title goes to crab fishermen off the coast of Alaska. Or coal miners in third world countries. Or perhaps child laborers in China who put together Happy Meal toys that my kids play with for ten minutes. The mother collecting rags to sell at a dump in Sao Paulo would be another nominee for having “the most difficult job”, I think.

Being an American Stay At Home Mom is one of the least difficult jobs I can think of. Yes, I gotta mop floors and wipe noses and dimpled bottoms and drive all over God’s green earth but it is not difficult. To me, having to wear pantyhose 40+ hours a week would be difficult. Having to deal with office politics, employee-lounge festering and crusty microwaves, nametags, cubicles, endless meetings, and commuting seems far more distasteful than anything that confronts me at home. Some women love those things, and that is great. They get exhilerated by working at a job and it is meaningful to them. Most likely, they see a side to the working world that I never saw when I had to wiggle my way into pantyhose or a hairnet.

But my kids are not trying to take my job. Any sexual harrassment issues that come up are easily solved by my flannel pajamas. I don’t worry about the ramifications of displaying my kids’ pictures openly, lest some co-worker or boss think of me as less dedicated because I have a family at home.

Most importantly, I have no paycheck. Nobody puts a value on the work I do because it is impossible. Over the years different dollar figures have come out that are oceans apart. I have seen homemakers valued at $500,000 year, but this article claims that homemaking is only worth $30,000 a year.

I bet the women collecting rags in slums would take that.

Yes, my job can be demanding. There is no dispute that it is critically important. I have days when, as a mother, I worry if I am doing a good job raising the kids. But the hardest job in the world? Never. I know how blessed I am to be a stay-at-home mom.

Hunting for a house is like hunting for a deer. You think you might see one, from afar, but as you approach you realize you were wrong. The deer is actually a rotting tree stump and the house “for sale” is actually advertising that Mile Hi Aeration was responsible for leaving the lawn looking like 10,000 dogs simultaneously used it as their collective toilet.

On Saturday we went out with our real estate agent, J. We saw eight houses in about six hours. I have a small set of criteria when it comes to our future house:

1. It must have at least four bedrooms.

2. It must have at least two bathrooms.

3. The driveway must not face north.

4. The yard must be fenced and there must be a deck or patio.

Here is a note to those of you who might be selling a house: do not pretend that the closet in the basement with exposed pipe and an orange shag throw rug is a “bedroom”. Do not advertise your 3X5 expanse of concrete outside your back door as a “deck”. Do not state that you have a “country kitchen” when New York cockroaches would find it cozy. Tell your children not to put “Dragon Tales” stickers all over their glass closet doors (still there in an empty house). I have my own children to clean up after. If we buy your house one of the contigencies is that you show up with a bottle of Windex in hand on moving day. Thank you. Another phenomenon we noticed is that nearly every house touts “RV parking.” This usually means there is gravel on the side of the house. “RV parking” is a nice way to say “we were too lazy to finish putting in the lawn, so we went to Home Depot and bought a truckload of gravel instead.”

We did have some good, but confusing results. My #1 house is hubby’s #2, and vice versa. It has made for a little bit of conflict, but we will get through it. We have more houses to consider later this week.

On Sunday we drove around neighborhoods on our own, searching for sale signs down side streets and hoping to see one we could tell J about. Our game plan was to put on a movie for the kids (Shrek 2), go through the McDonald’s drive-thru, and then hubby and I could concentrate on me leaping out of the car to retrieve the FREE (no kidding!) informational flyers attached to the for-sale signs.

After awhile every suburban street begins to resemble the last and it all becomes a blur of basketball hoops, tulip borders, tri-levels, ranches, split-levels, lawn ornaments, sidewalks, and nauseating curves meant to slow down traffic. I am a good navigator, but all the twists and turns in the typical subdivision rendered me incapable of discerning east from west and north from south by the time our day was through. Our hours of searching only produced three possibilities, which was a bit disheartening.

Do most people just settle for the lesser of all the “evils”, or do they find homes they truly fall in love with? I am not looking for the white picket fence, just somewhere I can picture my furniture. A backyard that my kids will make their own. A deck for summer evening barbeques, a non-padded toilet seat (ick!), and a garage that doesn’t have a poster of the Denver Nuggets cheerleaders left behind for the new man-of-the-house to enjoy.

My future home must still be out there, somewhere.