Wednesday, May 07, 2008

My Daily Battle

My quest seems hopelss, yet I forge on with it day after day... the effort to try to have the entire house clean at one time. I feel good if I can just keep the main living areas tidy. When I bust my back getting the whole place clean top to bottom, it's serene pleasure ends within hours, or even minutes depending on who is at home & who is not.

Don't get me wrong, there are no dishes piled sky high or anything (the laundry on the other hand is a different thing), but there are items strewn about everywhere constantly needing to be put away etc...

The floor area under the kitchen table is swept daily, often multiple times, yet everytime I turn around there are enough dropped food items to feed a dozen ant colonies, mixed in with crayon wrappers, coloring sheets, crayons, pencils, slippers, who knows what?....

On the days I can get one level clean I go downstairs to find the basement trashed with toys everywhere. Kids bedrooms - let's not go there. A constant battle. I can say my own bedroom fluctuates too.

Laundry... my #1 nemesis... HATE everthing about it!
It seems the day is so full of homeschooling, hours of cooking and meal prep, running errands or taking kids to classes/activities and so on, that the house is difficult to focus on for great lengths of time.

Yesterday though, due to several sick kids resulting in no school here at home, I was able to tackle some cupboard cleaning & reorganization, which felt good to accomplish. It's been one of those areas that has driven me (and my poor husband, the neat guy in the home) NUTS! Speaking of my poor husband, the "neat, orderly-minded guy" he has been very challenged with my... well... challenges in homekeeping. I regularly think to myself that if I hear, "A Place for everything, everything in it's place..." ONE MORE TIME, I will dive out the closest window and run screaming through the woods. WHAT was Benjamin Franklin thinking of when he coined that phrase? It has only caused homemakers throughout the ages to harbor guilt or have compulsive fixation on the matter. Have you ever stopped to think that not everything Good Ol' Ben sputtered is not THE last word on the subject? Take this one for example... hmmmmmm? I beg to differ with you Ben.

Despite these difficulties, I am happy that our house is by no means a pigsty, it is however full of kids stuff, books, and all their clothes - which seems to be any many as the grains of sand on the ocean shore. I have been sorting and discarding, but the whole job of packing away winter clothes, getting out summer clothes, saving sizes for the next kid, etc. etc.. makes me dizzy with 7 kids - one in every size from 4-13 and shoes being passed down and around at a rate where I just cannot keep up. When we do laundry, it's a family activity where I just hold it up and the owner claims it. Socks are a nightmare - we sit in a circle and I pass out socks (using the hold it up method) until everyone has their socks matched and mated. The kids however think it's quite fun.. the "sock game", or "sock time.... yeah!" as they call it - wish I shared their enthusiasm for this chore.

I know that I should be happy in my humble work and do it all to please my maker and my family, but boy does it get mundane. Luckily spring has finally arrived to possibly revive my spirits - although spring cleaning may have to wait until... ummm late summer, possibly fall??!

1 comment:

Prairie Political Ponderings said...

I bet you were wishing a fairy godmother named Kathleen would come and organize some cupboards and sock piles and the like for you, eh?