I have been dying to tell you that we got a new robot vacuum over the winter break. Actually, we got it at the very tail end of the break.

As you know, I adore my zooper with all my heart. I use it, oh, two or three times a day, mainly in the kitchen. Over the break, in addition to regular kitchen crumb fest, there was also debris from my giant glorious poinsettia (still, against all odds, alive) and then we sanded the workout area before we painted it so there was paint dust everywhere, and there always seem to be bits of leaves and sticks and pebbles of dog food all over our house at any given moment. Plus, instead of the house being occupied by mainly me, all three of us were home for two consecutive weeks. This combination resulted in a TON of zooping, let me tell you. 

Oh and also – NICOLE, BRACE YOURSELF – there was a mouse. Carla, despite lots of instruction on how to not attract mice and bugs, had been a little lax in keeping snacks under wraps in our pantry. Early on in the break, she found a meat stick with a bite taken out of it and a Jolly Rancher with a bite taken out of it, and that was enough for me to do a deep clean of the pantry during which time I found Definitive Mouse Evidence. 

I also found a teeny little crack in the pantry by the bottom of the door frame, which I filled in (temporarily) with Loctite mounting putty, which was on hand because I was hanging up holiday cards at the time. Next time the exterminator is here (he is ON THE SCHEDULE, believe me), I will ask him to replace the Loctite with something more durable. 

We subsequently caught a mouse (please let it be the only mouse) and Carla has been, under supervision, much better about snack foods. But as you can imagine, my zooping of crumbs has been all the more diligent since that revolting discovery.

Shockingly, I am the only one in my family who seems to appreciate the act of zooping. I feel as though I am always the one doing it. Even though it is literally a chore on Carla’s chore chart. If I dare remind her to do it, she will flop bonelessly over the nearest surface and groan and ask me if I can do it, pleeeeeeeeeeeease, just this once, she haaaaaaaates it and it’s soooo looooooouuuuddddd. And honestly, the whole ordeal would have been done by then so often I just roll my eyes and do it. (Is this teaching her that flopping and groaning will be rewarded or is it picking my battles? As with everything about parenting: impossible to know if I am doing the right thing.) 

Brief aside: When you were a kid, were you ever watching TV and your mom suddenly turned on the garbage disposal or started vacuuming in your vicinity and you were overcome with indignance that she would so thoughtlessly interrupt your TV viewing with such noise?!? (We also had a trash compactor as our kitchen garbage, which would mechanically compress the trash in the bin when you pressed a button. That, of course, also made a loud, TV-interrupting noise.)

Well, that happened to me frequently and I could never understand how my mother seemed to pick the exact worst time to be so annoying and loud. And now I am that mom. Because there is never a good time to execute a noisy chore, especially when you are all three together in one house for two weeks. 

My kid will loudly and huffily object to the noise of the zooper anytime I operate it within an our-house-sized radius of wherever she is.

My husband, though he never said it in so many words, seems to feel about my zooping the same as Kid Me did toward my mother running the garbage disposal during Family Matters. 

He mentioned, once or twice, that I seemed to be zooping quite a lot. To which I replied, I zoop two or three times daily, it’s just usually when you aren’t home. And then the zooper ran out of juice while I was ridding the workout room of paint dust, which shocked my husband. That had never happened in our old house! Well, the zooper works very hard and lasts a very long time but our current house is quite a bit larger than the old one. (And the floors of the old house hid dirt much better.) Do not blame the zooper; the zooper is not at fault.

After nearly two weeks of enduring twice or thrice daily zoopings, my husband set to researching robot vacuums. The brand I am most familiar with is Roomba, but he said reviews of Roombas are less favorable than he expected. I am also aware of Eufy, thanks to Elisabeth, which he said gets great reviews. But in the end he went with the Roborock Q5, mainly because it has a cool name. (Looks like the Q5 is no longer available, but the Q10 is and it’s $200 cheaper!) Just kidding. He did extensive research and this was the one that he deemed best. I am 99% sure he told me in excruciating minute detail all the specific reasons it was better for us than the others were, but I seem to have a blank space in my head where Roborock statistics should be. The main factor I remember is that it was on a really good sale (and still is, as of this writing!).

As pretty much everyone who has ever purchased a robot vacuum says: I do not know why we waited so long to get one. It is THE BEST. We were so excited when it arrived. As a family, we all watched it trundle around the main floor, mapping every room, and charmingly bumping into obstacles as it got used to where things were. We set it to clean and it bustled around picking up tiny scraps of plastic and bits of wax leftover from the Hanukkah candles and artificial pine needles from our tree and the aforementioned leaves/poinsettia buds/dog food and all the crumbs that accumulate as if from nowhere in our kitchen.

It is AMAZING. My floors have never been so clean. Rocky (that’s his name, of course) has an app (everything has an app, which I generally think is stupid, but I quite like Rocky’s app) and I can access it from my phone and I can see where he is and where he’s been. I can name each room in the house and assign him to vacuum specific rooms, or even specific parts of rooms. I can schedule him to vacuum every day right after breakfast if I want. He goes from carpeted to non-carpeted surfaces easily. He returns to his little house when he’s done cleaning and empties his collection of trash into a storage container. 

He is not quiet, but he’s not as loud as a regular vacuum; you can still talk at a normal volume while he’s cleaning. But you can hear him; he’s not meant to be silent; I don’t think I would program him to clean in the middle of the night because I think he would wake me up. He once got stuck on the edge of a rug when it folded over on him, but we simply put a footstool on that rug the next time we cleaned and that prevented any further issues. He can be programmed to avoid stairways, and if I have laundry piles all over the bathroom floor I can simply program him to skip that room. 

Lodged deep in my brain is a video I once saw of a robot vacuum spreading dog excrement all over someone’s house. So I think I would not leave Rocky to his own devices. (Not that we have a pet. Although I am still dreaming of Craig.) Right now, he’s still so novel and charming, Carla and I like to check on him occasionally while he works. I wonder if the novelty will eventually wear off, or if we will always continue to personify him and watch him fondly?

The only mild negative I have to say about Rocky is that he requires a home base. We’ve set him up in the kitchen, which I’m not a huge fan of; I like appliances, for the most part, to be out of sight. But I know that I will probably get used to his presence after a while, and if not, my husband promises we can move him to a less central location.

If you have been dithering about getting a robot vacuum, I will add my voice to chorus of people who say I wish I hadn’t waited so long.