It Isn't Clean 'til I Say So........

When my kids were younger, and there were seven in the house at one time, it was impossible to supervise any chore on a minute-by-minute basis.  So when a child would come and tell me they were finished with something and wanted to run off and do something more fun than help around the house, I would frequently have the following conversation:

"Is it clean?"  "Yes!" 

"Are you SURE?"  "YES!"

"Would I think it's clean? Because it isn't clean 'til I say so." 

This would be followed either by silent chagrin or a bluff, depending on the day or child.  After all, they COULD hope I wouldn't check, and sometimes they did win the gamble, especially since they were all gifted at asking at times when my hands were busy and I couldn't drop everything.

Last night my insomnia mated with my steroids, and despite a benedryl and some melatonin, I was wide awake at midnight, and very energetic.  We were all sick last weekend, and NOTHING (including, I confess, the catbox) got cleaned.  Even in my steroid-induced state I realized that I was unlikely to have the energy this weekend to do everything I need to do as well as I would like to, so I looked around and prioritized. 

Babygirl and I did an excellent job two weeks ago.  Dust is relatively unimportant.  Woodwork only really needs wiping withing the range of our dirty fingers.  And the dog hair has GOT to go.

By three AM I had done a very respectable job in the living room and dining room.  I awoke this morning and cleaned the kitchen, one bathroom, and the side of the house that is perpetually under construction, including mopping all floors and stairs.  My bedroom is swept, upstairs trash is ready to remove, and all I have left?  It's the damned catbox.

But.....If I skipped ripping the stove apart to clean under the drip trays, and cleaning my bedroom did not actually include making my bed, and there's dust on the mantle, is it really clean?

It is if I say so.

I'll say it again:  The key to having a good day is lowering your standards.

DeeDee

Week Seventy-four - Well Enough to Be Sick.....

This week's lack of posts isn't because I have nothing to talk about.  There are TONS of things going on that would make good stories:

My mom, after numerous phone calls to me (on such varied subjects as needing a cat groomer, needing a phone book, and needing faster responses to her messages) and my brother, woke him up at 1 AM because she needed assistance - with opening a can of sardines.

My office is surviving a transition in leadership.  LAS - we'd miss you but we know you aren't going far!  And A - good luck.  You'll get used to the insanity.

Babygirl has signed up to return to the swim team after a nearly three year hiatus.  We're hoping the school doc agrees that it's a GREAT idea.

My niece, after a scheduling glitch that postponed her C-section by 24 hours, was safely delivered of an absolutely BEAUTIFUL little girl. 

But it's too exhausting to think about it.  We've all been hit by a cold. 

"Hit" may be a touch of an understatement.  This thing grabbed us by the throats, rammed snot up our noses and then threw us out into bus traffic.  We are all achy, sneezy, wheezy and dopey.  And how, I might ask, did this cold manage to strike Citygirl when she lives four hours away??  She called while on her way, and croaked, "Is it safe for me to come home?  I have a cold."

Well, aside from the fact that we may end up trading germs and surviving two completely DIFFERENT colds, yeah, it's safe.  With Babygirl's neutrophil count over 1000, we're safe. 

And that, despite how crappy we feel, is completely awesome.

DeeDee

Week Sixty-eight - Food From the Garden....

We've been eating food from the garden for a while now.  Lettuce, radishes and herbs come early, and the lettuce just keeps coming.  Zucchini and cucumbers were plentiful until the hailstorms, and we aren't sure they're coming back.  The beans were a bust this year, but yesterday we got the first tomatoes.  I took bruschetta to a church dinner, made with queso fresco, basil, tomatoes and fresh bread.  The eggplants survived the hail somehow and are blooming, so we hope to see some fruit there.

But it's always most exciting when we get to harvest something we haven't tried to grow before.

Today, we picked corn.  We got 9 ears, the largest of which was about four inches long, and none of which had corn all the way around.  One stalk still has some tiny ears trying to come out, so we'll wait and see if they get bigger, although I'm not to hopeful.

So we grilled a steak, cooked some leftover potatoes with onions and butter, and cooked our corn.  There was a sort of mental drum roll, and.......

Sigh.  The vast majority of the time the food we get from our garden is FAR better than anything we buy in a grocery store.  Lettuce is crispy and we have more variety, beans are eaten before we can even cook them, pea pods consumed before the peas are even ripe.  But corn?  Not so much.  The local corn has been SO delicious this year that ours was a disappointment by comparison, anemic and starchy.  The best I can say is that it was better than LAST years' terrible crop of local corn.

It was fun to watch it grow, and I'll keep the stalks to decorate with for fall, but I think this'll be the only year we try corn. 

For Babygirl, the beauty of a garden is that it expands what she is allowed to eat.  It's much safer to make a salad from our own garden, where the lettuce is unlikely to be contaminated with E. coli and salmonella, that to try to 'degermify' what we buy in the grocery store.  I'm much more comfortable letting her sample something that we grew ourselves raw - she can't, musn't have uncooked green beans from the grocery store.  Who knows how many unwashed hands have been in that bin? When they coat fruits and vegetables with oils and waxes to make them look nicer, they are sealing God alone only knows what germs underneath, and it's hard to wash that stuff off.

We didn't start growing our own food for this reason.  But I'm glad we were already in the habit of doing so.

DeeDee

Extreme Housekeeping.....

Going on the mission trip was wonderful.  And spending a day with Babygirl at an amusement park on the way down to Philly was awesome.  Spending four hours in one of the biggest malls in America the next day was impressive. 

But what is far from wonderful, impressive and awesome?  The overall condition of my house. 

Three weekends away means three weekends of not cleaning much.  Four weeks.  Even in my more slovenly days I would likely have managed to pick up a broom at least once during that time!  So today was catch-up day. 

I was up at 6:30 and started, as usual, with a laundry sorting party in the basement (Big Family joke:  If I sort laundry and have 6 loads, and I wash 9 of them, how many do I have left?").  Then I had a pill sorting party in the pantry.  Coffee and toast on the back porch after opening all the windows to drop the 80 wake-up temperature to a low of 78 (it's 88 now). 

I have a tendency to run out of steam and let myself get distracted, so I motivated by setting the stove timer for an hour - no stopping 'til it beeps!  I did this a total of seven times today, starting each new hour with a load of laundry, and finishing each with a 20 minute break for water, lunch, and/or time in the pool to cool off.  Hubby had his own stuff going on, so we met in the pool every hour LOL. I don't believe I've ever cleaned in my bathing suit before.

The house is MUCH better.  I still have the upstairs bath to clean, but I can catch that tomorrow morning. 

I have a question, though:  If we only have one dog, how did I manage to sweep up four of them?  I swear I have an entire trash bag FULL of dog hair.  I wonder if I could make yarn......?

DeeDee