Clean House.

I DO appreciate a clean house.

My house is rarely ever spic and span clean, but occasionally it is for about an hour.  Today is my cleaning day…not a beach day or errand day…but a much needed cleaning day.

Yes we load/unload the dishwasher daily. And fold mountains of clothes daily…even scrub the bathroom multiple times per week with seven people in one tiny house…but clean clean weekly?

Nope.

Haven’t done this kind of cleaning in months.

Dust has moved in almost permanently as well as cat hair on literally every piece of furniture and somehow lampshade.

Organizing? Forget it…

Almost every drawer and closet is filled to capacity with misplaced items shoved in wherever they will fit.

Clean houses don’t seem to go hand in hand with busy lives…we shove things away to make the small living spaces look tidy, as we run out the door for the tenth time in a day. I may even occasionally use a dirty dish towel to dust off a few table surfaces as I walk the towels up to the laundry basket. If I am lucky, I will hit all three tables I pass by on my way up the stairs, if not too distracted with the twenty pairs of shoes/books/papers/bags piled on each step on my way up the stairs.

In my distraction up to the laundry, I may even notice the clumps of ever-growing cat hairs on the stairs, and blow them down with my breath to the landing (so then they are more consolidated) or use my now very dusty dish towel to shoo them down below.

Entering the hall bathroom where all the laundry hides in the closet, I come across wet towels and clothing strewn across the floor, then see the closet oozing with more wet towels and clothes as if it vomited dirty clothes all over the floor.

I remind myself daily that all these chores can be done quickly if all seven of us pitched in one day a week (along with the bickering of who-did-what-and-when and that they collected the trash already this week or did the dishes)instead of me giving up a whole day on the weekend…then I remind myself of these weekends…

My clean house weekends…just me, and some of my music, cleaning and schlepping up and down the stairs for hours…it sounds like torture, but for some reason, in my weird motherly way…its almost like a much needed Mommy Timeout.

I crave these days...for dusting to be an actual completed task, not just one or two tables at a time…the laundry done and put away…at least for one day.

To sit back when I am all finished, with a cocktail in hand (trust me…by the time I am done, it will be five o’clock here too) and actually seeing order in a very lived-in chaotic world.

But in all honesty, I am starting to appreciate the messy days here as well, as two of the kids leave for college very soon…they will take some these messes with them, but also some of my heart.

My house will be a little less messy but also a lot more quiet.

I am excited for the future and watching our children grow into individuals, but I am already beginning to miss what I have today…

A very dusty/ messy/ loud home…

But also full of life and love.

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Tired.

I am whooped.

All the time.

I am pretty sure the only time I ever sit is to go to the bathroom or write a blog.

From 5:30-ish (depending on how many times I can hit snooze without causing a panic attack) in the morning, until I lay down with my little ones at 8:30 at night…I do not stop moving. I keep expecting to pass by a mirror and see a Cindy Crawford type body…

But it is still me…

Frazzled, droopy-eyed, flabby me.

That’s okay…I have slightly accepted middle age…minus my thinning hair, constant confusion, stress, and of course…exhaustion.

I do not ever remember being so tired before kids. I know I do not sleep well, but never have since I was little.

Even when I worked seven days a week at two jobs and then went out late to the bars with friends, I was not this tired.

I know I hear many people swear that a nice glass of wine or cocktail can help with a good night’s sleep…not working on this lady! Even two or three sometimes have zero effect on this mommy.

I pump myself full of vitamins and supplements daily, eat better than ever…

Except for my terrible addiction to pork roll.

Maybe I should just accept that the ten minute cat nap occasionally as I get my toddler to nap, or the twenty minutes of dozing off as I try to read a book to the little ones at bedtime, is all I really need at this point in my life.

I read once that Martha Stewart only sleeps like four hours a night…I could handle that. 

I could get ALL the laundry done AND folded, make lunches, dust, answer emails, write a blog more than once a week, prep meals…just no vacuuming…that wouldn’t be fair to a house full of peacefully sleeping kids and hubby.

Maybe even slowly build an empire based on early morning crafts/baking/organizing…

Or maybe not.

I don’t want to be up at four in the morning anymore than any other mom reading this…

I would love peace and quiet occasionally, and less clutter, AND sleep…

But I will settle for maybe five or six hours tonight since I just got the laundry all done AND put away, vacuumed (half the house), and cleaned up dinner ALL before bedtime…

I deserve that extra half hour of slumber tonight.

And hitting snooze a few times.

When I’m 57…

My baby boy will eighteen.  My oldest will be going on thirty-three.

My oldest randomly text-ed me this unnerving question the other day, as she lay poolside in warm and sunny Florida on Spring Break…while I was here on  the home front, caring for the little ones and managing the house.

“Have you ever thought how old your gonna be when Chance JUST graduates high school?? Not even college yet!”

I gasped when I first read it…

What on Earth was my beautiful, eighteen year old daughter thinking by asking me this question???

I shared the question on Facebook, only because it was so insane at that moment, I needed some motherly backup…reassuring me that yes indeed my kid was rude and inconsiderate.

How are we to send her off to college in a few months and let her live in the city on her own, when she doesn’t even know one of the basic skills of life...think before you speak…or text.

Later that night, I laughed about it.

Not because I thought it was funny, but because I overreacted.

My daughter was starting to ponder life…the big bad world that lies before her. She was genuinely concerned at how old I may be when my youngest is her current age…maybe because she thought I may be crippled or too fragile by then to help him through his senior prom and graduation.

And help pack up his things and ship him off to college fifteen years from now…

Or maybe even whether I may be alive…maybe she hasn’t yet grasped different stages in life and aging, not realizing that 57 is still pretty young in our world.

When she returns from her mini Spring Break in Florida with her Grandparents, I may have to pull her aside and ask her what provoked such a thought.

Until then, I will take this Forty-something old body that is a little sore at the moment, but healing and getting healthier everyday (all due to my new way of eating and lifestyle so I live to be a hundred), and continue folding mountains of laundry, sort through the explosion of summer clothes that my teenage girls dug through for their last-minute getaway, and wait for my husband to come home from yet another trip to give me a “mommy time-out”…

I am told I will miss these crazy days someday, when all the kiddos have moved on to college/jobs/starting their own lives…

I probably will after my 57 year old body locks the front door, takes my bra off through my sleeve, throws it on the ceiling fan, cracks open a chilled bottle of wine and blasts some Duran Duran like the free spirit I once was…

a long, long time ago, in a galaxy far away…

FLEAS.

It seems appropriate to me after not being able to write for weeks now, to title my latest blog about the reason…Fleas.

I am hoping this will be short and sweet, but that could unleash some bad karma on me, as things seem to be settling down finally with our “house guests”.

We didn’t invite them. There was no party for them to crash…but they came in like gangbusters. One by one (maybe ten by ten), and slowly decided to take over our lives.

Creepy, crawly, or jumpy-  whichever way you look at it, they have officially ruined the last month or so of our lives.

Instead of thinking of something clever to write or something relevant to Karma being a “good thing”, I spent almost every free second online researching how destroy these little buggers “nicely”.

My husband doesn’t want to play “nice” anymore…he has had it. The kids have had it. Bites galore on one of my children, is enough to drive us mad. The feeling of them on our skin getting ready for the attack…insane…AND gross.

I refuse to bomb the house and expose us to any more chemicals, not to mention packing up every blessed item in our bedrooms, kitchen, bathrooms, etc. We may still need to do it, but I am hoping the salt and baking soda all over every inch of our  hardwood floors and carpets is doing the trick along with all sorts of pills/ointments/combing I can administer…the only bonus to my floors looking like a bad baking experiment or drug lord’s den, is the instant ice skating rink for the kids and kittens.

The feeling of bugs in our hair or beds is in our imagination, for sure…I hope…

We all stand around looking at the mess these little uninvited guests have done in the last few weeks…it is unreal.

My house hasn’t been this clean in ages, yet still feels so dirty. My vacuum is my new best friend, as well as a few drinks every night after endless washing and bagging things up to throw outside…will it ever end?

Apparently it will. From the countless message boards I have scoured, to articles online and friends’ advice on social media…they all sympathize with us, having gone through it, survived, and can now tell me how to do things…so that is the light at the end of this nightmare…

Maybe my next blog will be about giving advice on HOW TO GET RID OF FLEAS FOREVER…

But I won’t get ahead of myself…

Messes.

UPDATE: Even almost two years later, I am STILL feeling this way…and life just got even crazier around here! Which is NOT helping in the mess department…oh well. I will get to it someday.

 

I am THAT Mom. I hate messes. I despise them actually. Toys, piles of papers, shoes, laundry, overflowing trash bins…it drives me almost mad…not there just yet…but VERY close.

My house is ALWAYS a mess, it seems.  I don’t think it bothers me so much because of what others may think, I think it is just truly and honestly ME…I get this fire in my belly about it.  Sometimes it unleashes itself to my husband and children, or sometimes I just run around the house mumbling under my breath about “how many stinking times will I pick up this toy” or shoe or sweatshirt…the list of objects is endless.

I grew up in a house with three sisters and a mother and stepfather. Our house was only clean on the weekends and “pre-party” as my sister calls it.  We kids did a majority of the cleaning, (which is ok since I want my kids to also learn how to keep their things neat and organized and clean…but I am still working on that), and huffing and puffing that we hated Saturdays and chore lists and could care less about folding clothes, weeding gardens and washing pots and pans.

Our kids/mess makers sound a lot like me and my sisters did. They are 17, almost 15(tomorrow, but who’s counting!), seven and two…so the array of chores/capabilities is vast and the assortment of things they leave behind in my little home is UNREAL.

How can someone be asked to put their shoes away that are laying in the MIDDLE of the floor, and only grab ONE?!

Or to clean the mountain of clothes strewn across the floor in the teenagers’ room, only to find the clothes shoved in the closet or overflowing drawers…

Or ” Hey, could load the dishwasher for me while I am making dinner?” thanks beautiful offspring of mine who is fully capable and intelligent enough to know that means EVERYTHING in the sink…and then WIPE and RINSE out the sink…task complete…no such luck. Remnants of food and God only knows what else still lay in the sink and all over the counter and floor around the dish loading area.

NOT my actual kitchen, but how I am feeling when the kids clean the kitchen…

 

I am stalling right now, writing yet another post about something that may bring me bad karma for thinking/writing it, that these little and big messes are all around my feet, irritating me to no end…My Little Ponies under my desk, on my desk, under my chair. Puzzle pieces, cars, and more DVD’s than I can count are all over our family room, thanks to my two year old who thinks DVD’s are toys. I am avoiding the inevitable as my son naps…time for a “blitz” as I like to call it…tidy everything up just so I can sit back (did I just type the word sit?!) and look around at my cute little home and feel pride…

Not happening…

My kids- as much as I love them- irk me. They are not learning from me…the tireless job of mothering, or as they like to call it, nagging.  My job is to TEACH them life skills and nurture and love them (they are all getting a D this marking period from me).They tell me to make chore charts, (so I don’t need to nag) write it down, leave notes on their door…yeah right. I still have to nag about where the chore list went, or sticky note that said exactly what I needed done…commence nagging. I would do it all for them, really. I don’t mind cleaning, but it is the repetition of doing the SAME chores every single day, that are driving me batty.  So sharing the “wealth” helps keep me sane and is supposed to teach them some responsibility…supposedly…

So with a little more structure during this school year, I will be making a new chore chart, and doing my blitz momentarily, and then quite possibly having ten minutes to spare to sit back and enjoy the view…before they all come home again…