Tuesday, March 29, 2011

A House Full of Dwarfs

So, it's day two of Spring Break and things are grooving here at this Random House (and of course as right this sentence I am interrupted five times to break up fights and answer the same question twice). We have some pals stopping by for a visit this afternoon and the Wee Ones are so stoked that they have spent much of the past 24 hours helping me to clean and organise the house.

For those of you who know me personally or have been reading this blog since the beginning you know that I am a recovering Domestically Challenged individual but what you may not know is that my control freak tendencies have caused me to swing in the other direction. I wouldn't go so far as to call myself a neat freak but I am pretty picky about how I clean and organise, so much so that Mr. Awesome and the Wee Ones rarely are allowed to help me clean.

I know it sounds crazy, a busy mom turning down help to clean, but I do ... all the time. I get a little mental when the middle of the room is vacuumed but not along the baseboards, or when the kitchen is cleaned except for wiping the table or when the pillows are left in a heap on the couch rather than being arranged properly. I have been mocked and chastised by friends who say they would be blown away with any offer o help from their family and I regularly turn help away. Shame on me?

So yesterday when I started to tidy up the house and Crafty offered to help I said okay. Then Dude wanted in on the cleaning action and Mischief followed along, mostly because he had no one left to play with. So we made a list of all the chores that had to be done and the kids each chose two zones to clean. I watched them scurry around sweeping, dusting and organising and tried to ignore the dust around the baseboards and the teetering stack of 'organised' books on the end table. At the end of the day they toured me around the house to proudly display all that they had accomplished.

"It's just like you have a house full of dwarfs!" Mischief declared.

"What?" I asked, searching for the link between clean house and little people.

"Y'know like Sleeping Snow, wait no, I mean the White girl ... Snow White and all those dwarf guys she made clean her house. You're just like her, Mom and her House Full of Dwarfs."

Not quite the stuff of fairy tales but I'll take it!

1 comment:

Cat Connor said...

Hilarious! I confess to doing the exact same thing. I'm REALLY particular about the cushions on the couch and polishing and the way books are put away... it's an illness?? :)
Breezy is a dab hand with the duster and a sponge cloth, I usually don't mind her helping! (And The Boy Wonder used to mop a mean floor when he was 6 and 7...sadly at nearly 20 he has forgotten that skill!)

Enjoy your dwarf filled home... LOL