Clean and Mean

I'm a terrible house keeper.

There is no denying it.

I bounce from art project to art project leaving a trail of craft supplies in my wake.

I do the dishes.

I wash the laundry.

I vaccuum the floor,

but not much else.

I'm only fairly sure that my sink is silver under the coat of paint residue from rinsed out paint brushes that's coated it since the first week we moved in.

It has certainly caused a few issues:

I'm not going to invite you in if you stop by unannounced.

I'm not surprised when we trip and fall over toys left in the hallway, 

because the kids aren't going to pick them up.

I'm not going to pick them up,

so they can stay in the hallway, until someone steps on them and breaks them and they get to go to that toy box in the sky aka the trash can.

I thought my family hated how messy I am.

Certainly they'd be happier if their toys weren't getting broken underfoot.

If they could sit down on the couch without shuffling almost the entire collection of Dr Seuss's books back toward the shelf from whence they came.

If we could sit down at the kitchen table for a meal without first rehoming a dozen pine cones and a glue gun.

So, I made 

Become a Better HouseKeeper

my first goal for my weeks of focus

and I made everyone miserable

but the most miserable of all was me.

I started with the laundry.

I can't remember the last time ALL the laundry was clean.

Probably sometime before our oldest was born.

It turns out that when all the laundry is clean we do not have enough space to put it.

A drawer in our dresser broke when Peter tried to fill it with the 99,000 pairs of socks that had at long last been reunited with their mates.

I put dresses on hangers and then was unable to put them in the closet because it was too full.

(Which is weird, because I literally never buy clothes. I'll pick a few things up at the thrift shop when I need something specific, like a red shirt for spirit day, or a blouse for a wedding, but aside from the ill fitting cardigans I'm routinely gifted at Christmas, it's really rare for me to buy clothes- so how did this happen?????)

So I stopped cleaning the house and filled three garbage bags full of things to drop at Goodwill.

All of that was on day one.

I had cleaned ALL DAY and hadn't even really finished the laundry, which really put me behind on my goal to have the entire house sparkling by the end of the week.

Day 2 came and I attacked.

I set aside the unfinished laundry and went after my kitchen

Which was hard,

not because cleaning is hard,

(which it kind of is)

but because it was a beeeeaaauuutiful day outside.

Every fiber of my being wanted to be outside in the sunshine,

but I was already so far behind.

By the time the sun set the floor sparkled

the table was bare

the fridge was emptied of everything past it's prime.

But the day was gone,

and any satisfaction I may have felt by completing the task was abated by the pile of dirty laundry that had grown by 6 outfits.

It loomed like a monument to my failure as a home maker.

Any satisfaction I may have felt at all was completely undone less than 24 hours later by an unknown person spilling an unknown substance all over the floor creating a dry ocean of stickiness.

I'm not cleaning it up.