Saturday, December 22, 2007

uncleaning the house

Since my children spend so much of their time uncleaning the house for me I have changed my perspective on cleaning the house. I remember back before I had kids, and even when I just had Peter and Kate, I could get the whole house clean in part of a day and then really enjoy having a clean house for a couple of days. Now, rather than cleaning the house to have a clean house, I clean the house so that I don't have an even dirtier house. It's always going to be messy- as long as the kids are little and making huge messes daily. Maybe if I had the time to actually put everyone's toothpaste on their toothbrushes for them, put the soap on their hands and then lock it away, make them all drink out of sippy cups with lids that only a parent knows how to remove, make them never ever have more than one toy out at a time (but then how could they play dress up/ babies/ church/wedding/restaurant? a lot of toys go into that kind of playing), feed the baby her cheerios one at a time, have a toilet paper dispenser that only allows 4 squares per child per hour, and many other impossible things then I could have a clean house. But we live here and life is messy- so I'll clean to keep the house from getting dirtier. And I'll keep on scraping the toothpaste off the kids sink and counter right before company comes, buying way too many bottles of hand soap, spot cleaning the wood floor after spilled drinks, pushing the toys aside to make a clear path for anyone who has to go to the bathroom in the middle of the night, stepping on cheerios, and buying toilet paper in bulk (atleast they're wiping, right?).

3 comments:

dkt said...

Wow, Rachel, you've come a long way! :-)

Middle-Aged Moi said...

Tee hee. Yep. Just clean it to keep you out of utter chaos. Me too...:-)

brookebrownell said...

well, my house is ALWAYS perfect with four, four and under, and in my first trimester with #5. i mean perfect does mean DHEC has't shut us down yet, right?