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Nothing gets me more motivated to clean than a household renovation project. Dust and debris land anywhere and everywhere, in between the buttons on the remote control, inside every crevice of the hardwood floors, and often underneath the straps of my bra. I always start a project thinking I’ll just wait until all the dust has settled before I pick up a broom but end up following my husband around with the suction end of a vacuum cleaner in a futile effort to combat the mess as we go.
During our kitchen remodel in late 2003 I’d spend the majority of my day cleaning up after the previous day’s mess in between trips to the hardware store to pick up yet another tool. I remember thinking that my life would be like that forever, an endless string of dirty rags and full vacuum bags, and I envied other couples who spent their nights watching sitcoms. Because I spent mine in line waiting to pay for paint.
I’m currently in my third trimester with my second child, and the nesting hormone is hitting me harder than the first time around. I’ve got plans and my husband can’t keep up. First, we’re doing a bathroom “refresh” and that involves destruction, paint and plumbing. I haven’t seen my husband in seven days. He’s spending his time running back and forth between any number of hardware stores in the Salt Lake City area just like he did during the kitchen remodel in 2003. Again and again. He’s made a huge mess in our downstairs, filling every open space with cardboard boxes, tools and special dad words that should not be repeated in front of teachers at school, young lady.
The nursery needs to be finished as well, and while we’re not doing much with the room in terms of remodeling, we are going to have to clean out the room and rearrange furniture. Which means I’ll be vacuuming, scrubbing, and spending my days yearning for a normal life again. Other couples will spend their evenings catching up on reality television while we get to know our our local strangers at the hardware store.
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I’ve actually had a few people gawk at me when I tell them that my near five-year-old daughter has been cleaning her own room for the last year or so. My belief has always been that if she is skilled enough to make a gigantic mess, then she’s quite capable of cleaning it up. And after her room started looking like the Disney store princess section completely exploded in it, I realized that cleaning up was no longer an optional part of her week, but rather, a regular, mandatory chore.
Quinlan, Age 4
Since my daughter has been making her bed for a long time, and has helped with cleaning up toys and emptying dishwasher trays since she could walk and sort, the transition to cleaning up her room wasn’t that difficult.
However, she’s still four years old and when left to clean on her own, I’d end up finding clothes stuffed in cabinets, books stacked on bureaus, and toys packed into any open crevice, which meant that at some point that week, I’d need to go clean up her attempt at cleaning.
So I came up with a few simple ways to ensure that she’d be able to actually clean up for herself and not cause me extra work.
1. The List: Make a list of what needs to be done before she can leave her room. You can do this on a piece of paper, or better, on a white board or some sort of chart that she can check off. This way, you won’t have to visit her room fourteen times when she says “I’m done” only to find that the only thing she did was shove a few things into her closet and close the door.
2. Lots of Bins: I’ve already espoused my love for bins, however, in this case, they are pretty much essential. If your kids can’t read yet, then consider creating picture labels. If they can read, whip out your trusty label maker (in my house that’s a sharpie and some old address stickers). We found ones that fit conveniently into her book shelves and on her closet floor, so she can easily pile things into them without needing to do any major organization work on her own.
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I have been home by myself with two kids for a full year now, and as my son Gram has grown increasingly mobile, I’ve learned a lot about managing the house in such a way to prevent the total undoing of any cleaning that I manage to get done. My daughter is old enough to occupy herself with drawing on her easel or playing quietly with a few toys, but my little guy seems hellbent on proving every stereotype about little boys to be true. Over the past few months, I’ve determined that for every hour I spend cleaning and picking up the house, it only takes my son about ten unsupervised minutes to make things worse than they were before I started. Around here we call this ratio the Rule of Gram. If you only have one kid that ratio might be more generous or if you have male triplets it may be far worse. No matter what, if you’ve got kids your best solution to keeping your house clean once you’ve gone through the effort is probably to get out of it immediately. Exeunt domus. Vamoose. Scram.
This past winter here in Michigan, daily cleaning proved to be a hopelessly Sisyphusian task. Being trapped in the house by the cold and the snow was certainly tough, and we spent a lot of time at the art museum. I may have even shooed the kids out of a clean house and driven them to a certain fast food emporium with an indoor playground that my daughter has taken to calling THE FUN PLACE. There were plenty of days that my wife came home to a household in shambles, but I didn’t even apologize. Some days you just have to learn to tolerate the mess.
I’m currently locked in a battle of wills with my three-year-old. No, it’s not over food or sleep or potty or wearing pants. It’s something much more twitchy. It’s bookshelf arrangement.
I prefer to see books lined up like so:
Descending in height left to right, spines evenly lined up about an inch or so from the edge of the shelf. Okay, maybe up to an inch-and-a-half. Okay, mostly just generally even. I mean, I’m not insane about it, or anything.
My three-year-old, however, will rearrange things every time:
He wants the books pushed back as far as possible, against the wall, with NO consideration for width and non-lined-up spines and gaaaaaaaah I cannot stand this must fix must FIX.
Let’s just call a spade a spade here and admit that some of the um…menfolk among us are less than their sparkling best when it comes to tidying up around the house.
In fairness, I am not a clean freak, in that I am not actually into cleaning. However this is trumped by the fact that I am also not into having to trip over six size XL men’s jackets on the floor on my way into the house. And so I pick them up. I only nag every 11th time or so.
Maybe love means never having to say “Oh my God you are KILLING ME with the jacket on the floor thing.”
This is not a condemnation of all men. In fact, Jim recently made me swoon more than a little, what with his admirable fitted sheet folding skills and excellent taste in early 90s alternative rock.
As for the guy I call the father of my children, he is another story. He is delightful in any number of ways, but he also displays some bizarre genetic imperative to leave his boxers on the bathroom towel rack, coffee grinds in the sink, empty milk containers on top of the trash can because evidently stepping on the foot pedal to open it is sooooo haaaaard. There is also a pattern of leaving dirty socks around the living room, like a wolf marking his territory with his scent.
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