Thursday's Thoughts: Meeting Today's Goals.

I won't be blogging tomorrow.  It will be my 10th wedding anniversary, so I will be drilling the kids on what will be considered appropriate behavior for when the babysitter is here.

Tomorrow evening, the mister and I will head out to a Mediterranean vegetarian dinner (we're meatless on Fridays), where I plan to have wine AND dessert.  Then we'll catch a movie.  It is the tried-and-true, good old fashioned American date formula.  We do it once a year if we're lucky, so I am excited.

All of this brings me to today's goals.  I plan to employ the kids to help me clean the entire house, top to bottom.  We got a decent amount of cleaning done a few days ago in their rooms and the bathrooms, but the living room and kitchen need some intense attention.  Since the kids are great at the more superficial stuff (loading and unloading the dishwasher, sweeping, mopping, picking up toys), I'll be able to focus more on the deep cleaning things.

Giving our house this kind of attention, sadly, is usually a holidays/special occasion/mommy meltdown kind of event.

Every time I do this, in my head I swear up and down that we're going to do daily picking up and chores that will keep the place lovely and peaceful, which leaved Saturdays open for more intense cleaning, made LESS intense because the week's cleaning went so well.  At its longest, this has lasted for four days.  The kids would pick up the living room before going to their rooms for the evening, then they'd pick up their rooms before going to bed.  But once I or my husband was too tired to enforce it, the whole thing would fall apart.

I have to remind myself that they ARE kids.  They are constantly and consistently messy.  I have to celebrate their creative processes and their learning through their playing.  But I also need to strike a balance between that and the responsibility of keeping a clean living space, respect for property, and expectations for the bare minimum when it comes to pulling their weight.  Therein lies my failure, and it is entirely mine.  The way things are now, it's more of a pendulum process: messy is awesome, until it's time for things to be super-duper clean.

Well, the one thing that stuck in my head from when I was a kid was the "one end to the other" approach.  My mom usually said it in the context of clearing the kitchen counters, but when I apply it more broadly (to the whole house), sometimes things just get done.  Whatever is still in my face by the time I hit the back door usually ends up in a donation bag.

One of these days, I'll make "one end to the other" a daily habit and that will turn my days into more peaceful and serene moments.  Until then, the pendulum is in full swing and it's cleaning time.

Cue the doomsday music. ;-)