Summer Cleaning...Check!

Today I will be able to check off the final room on my cleaning list.  It's a bit of a colossus, our finished basement.  It serves as a family room, play room, laundry room, and office to me.  It typically is strewn with miscellaneous toys, video games, blankets, pillows, papers, dirty laundry, and the bane of the existence...Legos!  I don't touch Legos as far as cleaning up.  They apparently have specific bins in which they belong, but to me they all look the same...little daggers ready to slice into my feet and twist my ankles.

But, after today, everything will have been dusted, vacuumed, wiped clean, Windexed.  It's never all clean, all at the same time, but at least now I'm in a position to maintain.  I'm sorry, but this is important to me.  The number one piece of advice people gave me while working was to not worry so much about having a clean house.  So I tried not to worry and my house became scuzzy and I felt awful.  It actually got to the point where it was physically painful to sit in my living room and look around at the mess.  My skin crawled.  For me, a clean house is sanity.  It represents an organized life and a sense of control over my life, at least my little piece of the world contained in those walls.

Oh, don't worry!  Having three boys and a husband has kept me real in terms of what is realistically expected and "clean" is a relative term.  At any given moment, there is a very high possibility that there is pee on my bathroom floor and something sticky is on one of the kitchen walls.  There is always a pile of something somewhere that belongs elsewhere.  Usually, I take it in stride and roll with it, cleaning it in stride.  Every now and then I have a small meltdown which is a sign to my family that the overall state of a room has crossed the line and they all pitch in and clean. Even they are starting to sense the line of disorder and will begin to straighten up unprompted by me.

My summer projects list, which I guess you can say were "challenges" just not very fun or distracting ones, is now considerably shorter.  The remainder of my list includes the garden--this is a part of my life where the threshold for order needs to be reigned in...A LOT.  I don't have weeds.  I have weed trees.  Part of the reason it gets out of control is the sun.  And bugs.  And it hurts my back.  And things grow much bigger than when I originally planted them.  I guess you can say I don't like gardening.  I like the thought of it.  I appreciate nice gardens.  I in no way know how to design them and maintain them.  It's a problem, but the neighbors are starting to stop and look for all the wrong reasons you want them to stop and look at your landscaping.  Too bad they can't see the inside of my house.  There have actually been people that come in and are literally amazed at how nice it is on the inside.  It's not really all that nice, but I think their expectations have been considerably lowered based on the state of my outside and they are pleasantly surprised.  Maybe I should keep this trend going.