#1: Finding a housekeeper
The plan is to find someone who will give the floors a good clean, dust everything, and leave the kitchen and bathroom sparkling once a week. This will cost some money. But I think that what it will save in time (not to mention a better relationship with my husband) will be well worth it. However, given that we have two dogs constantly tracking in dirt and liberally shedding everywhere, this won't be quite enough to keep the floors as clean as they need to be now that we have a baby who can crawl, which brings us to...
#2: Getting a robot.
Jetson Time! These vacuuming robots
have been around for years, but I've always hesitated. Seems like now they've worked out a lot of the kinks. It has little side-brushes for walls and corners, avoids rug fringe, focuses on dirty areas, and docks itself! A number of Amazon reviewers who are also proud parents of young children AND multiple dogs swear by this model, so I think we're going to take the plunge. I'm also secretly hoping that the robot-ness of it will make my husband want to take charge of making sure that the robot gets run every day or two. Then again, he isn't the one who studied robotics at summer camp, so this may not work out the way I think it will...#3: Buying food
We do our grocery shopping at Trader Joe's (although we buy all our produce at the farmer's market), and for the last couple months we've been doing a lot of experimenting with the prepared foods, or almost-prepared foods, there. The frozen asparagus risotto, for example, is quite good (especially if you add in some clams or sardines...).
We are also considering having more of our food delivered. Since we live in northern California, there are a ton of local CSAs that will deliver a box of local organic fruits and vegetables every week. The thing is that I really enjoy our weekly trips to the farmer's market, and I also suspect that they're good for our daughter--so I'm not in a hurry to cross that off my to-do list. Of course, this may change once I get a taste of being in the hospital 60-80 hours a week...
There's even a local service called Michal the Milkman that will deliver dairy to your door weekly (milk, eggs, butter, yogurt). If we do start using a CSA, I would probably sign up for dairy delivery too, since then we could get away with less-frequent grocery store trips. Then all I would need is a bakery that will deliver bread...
#4: Making meals
As I mentioned, we've already started experimenting with eating more prepared foods from Trader Joe's. I'm tempted to buy a well-reviewed cookbook
which provides recipes 
based on the foods available there. We do have one other favorite "quick and easy" cookbook, by NY Times writer Mark Bittman, called Kitchen Express: 404 Inspired Seasonal Dishes You Can Make in 20 minutes Or Less
. We've probably tried about 20 of the recipes so far, and I don't think there's been a single dud. It's a particularly good 
cookbook if you buy your produce at the farmer's market, since it's organized seasonally.We're also probably going to sign up for weekly Indian food delivery from Tiffin Dinner, a local family business that delivers home-cooked Indian meals to the Stanford area; on Tuesday nights they offer free delivery to our neighborhood. They're reasonably priced and quite tasty!
#5: Buying household goods
I think we've found two ways to reduce the number of trips we have to make to a Big Box store to buy household staples like toilet paper, soap, etc. First, we've switched to reusable products rather than disposables where we can. That means cloth diapers, lovely cloth napkins, flour sack towels instead of paper towels, dish cloths rather than sponges, and glass containers or washable cloth bags for storing food rather than ziplock bags.
But we still need laundry detergent, bar soap, shampoo, toilet paper, and so on. And then I saw this article in the New York Times "Your Money" section yesterday, about a "Subscribe and Save" service from Amazon.com, through which you can sign up to have them automatically send things to you every month or 3 or 6, with free shipping, and save 15% off the normal cost. My husband and I were so excited that we immediately proceeded to subscribe for soap, detergent, toilet paper, etc. The only thing I will say is that the quantities are sometimes better suited for a larger household than ours--there were some things we would have gotten except that we couldn't possibly use their minimum amounts every 6 months. Still, it's a really neat idea.
Do you have any household shortcuts to share? How do you make sure that your time is spent where it counts, rather than doing chores?
