Fall Cleaning

Right before Thanksgiving, I became thoroughly disgusted with the condition of my van. In fact, it was the day of the Twilight movie when I realized that there was not even the remotest possibility of me driving people in my car to the movie.  The very next day, I pulled out the heavy artillery and went to work. Between hauling all the leftover junk into the house, driving to a carwash, washing, vaccuming, and shampooing, it took a looooong time. It's a good thing we have our own rug doctor, because I spent about two hours just shampooing. I was so thorough, I even shampooed the ceilings, which had splatters of something on it. Lexi came home from work and couldn't believe I would do such a project without her, so she started in on her car too.

Leelee had to go in her exersaucer for a while, since Keith was changing the oil on the car at the same time. Poor girl was not too happy, but eventually wore herself out.

I did feel rather sad for her, but she of course woke up for good as soon as I took her out of the chair. Anyway, it felt so good to have a clean(er) van!

More Mommy Confessions

I mop my floor pretty regularly--I would say about once a week. Some of you are gasping in disgust; hopefully most of you think that is okay. Anyway, you would think my floors would be relatively clean, but you would be wrong. I recently decided to tackle the grout, and it was shockingly disgusting. It made me think of Stanley Spadowski from UHF:

And sometimes, life sticks to the floor so bad a mop isn't good enough. It's not good enough. You gotta get down here with a toothbrush and really scrub, and if that doesn't work, if that doesn't work...you can't give up. You've got to run to a window and say, "HEY! THESE FLOORS ARE AS DIRTY AS H---, AND I'M NOT GOING TO TAKE IT ANYMORE!!!"

I've been on my hands and knees scrubbing the grout with magic erasers for multiple days, and there is still more to go. But the improvement is obvious, no? Yikes.

Thank goodness for sudden bursts of energy

And for sleeping babies, and baby swings, and kids that will entertain themselves for a couple hours, and for kids that will do chores to earn the right to scrub the toilet.

I haven't felt very well for a couple of days, and things around my house have definitely suffered. Somehow today I managed to do a pretty good job of catching up. I did dishes, swept and mopped the floor, crushed a bunch of pop cans, scrubbed all three bathrooms and mopped them too, washed 3 loads of laundry, picked up the family room and vacuumed, cleaned up my bedroom and made my bed to boot. Lest you think I totally neglected my kids today, we did spend two hours at the park for a preschool field trip.
Still to come this evening: bathe the kids, fold all of those clean clothes, clean out the van, and hopefully, dinner at Panda Express. A mom and can only be expected to do so much, right?!

A clean toy room!

We have toys. A lot of toys. And lately, I have just been getting completely sick and tired of said toys being strewn from heck to breakfast all over my house. I don't know how so many of you out there manage to have it all together and keep your houses orderly and presentable, but this is something we struggle with over here. My kids can take a clean house and turn it into a CPS case faster than I can use the bathroom.

So it came down to this: either throw away all of the toys, or find some way to lock them away so that I can have control. We came up with the (rather expensive) solution of purchasing plastic bins with lids from Walmart and gigantic wardrobes with shelves from Ikea. And so, $600 and some serious hard labor later, I have a newly organized toy room.

Our new rule is they can each play with one bin at a time. If they want to play with something else, they have to clean up the first bin before they can get another out. And again, without the locks there is no way this system would work around here--not with these two around.

I am mad at how blurry this picture came out, but it is still cute.