Cleaning Dervish

Yesterday I spent the evening at Stefanie's house-- our kids played and watched a movie, Stef fed us pizza and we chatted for literally hours. I enjoyed it very much, but my girl time had some whacked out consequences for my day today.

As the conversation does sometimes between mothers, the subject turned to the challenges of keeping a house clean and I remember mentioning how thoroughly trashed my carpet is, how utterly disastrous everything is in general. "Mention" probably isn't the right word-- more like it was a confession of just how filthy I allow my house to get. The reasons for my house imitating a pig sty are quite simple: I have four destructive kids, Terence and I are not compulsive housekeepers, and I spend a lot of my time doing other things (like exercise, writing, reading books, indexing, and driving to the other side of the planet). And even though Stefanie was extremely sympathetic rather than judgemental, for whatever reason I felt horrible about it last night when I got home and saw the disaster that awaited me.

Of course, like normal, I ignored it as best I could and went to bed.

But this morning (after carpool and exercise, of course) I stood around looking at my living room and groaning. It wasn't cluttered too badly. But the carpet!! And the walls! And my furniture!! All smudged and splotched and spattered and stained. And something snapped inside me. I turned into a whirlwind. First I picked up the little things scattered around and then vacuumed like my life depended on it. After that I furiously attacked my carpet. A full bottle of carpet cleaner and a pile of rags later, I had made a least a marginal improvement on it. Not much I can do about the green food coloring stain from four years ago, or the permanent pink swatches (remnants of multiple red Crystal Light incidents). Even after that I wasn't satisfied though. Armed with more wet rags I attacked the walls. That took some elbow grease, and there are some spots that will require both Magic Eraser and a coat of paint, but at least the chocolate fingerprints are gone.

Probably I would have kept going (my baseboards have more than four years of grime built up, and hey, I do have an old toothbrush available) but unfortunately, I ran out of time. My stomach was violently growling; my cue that the older kids are due to arrive home soon. This afternoon's agenda includes three piano lessons, Home Depot and the bank, so I'll have to give up for now.

I wonder if this insane desire to clean like I'm OCD will last until tomorrow. Probably not. Oh well, at least I have clean walls today.