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Wednesday, April 22, 2015

How to get your floors cleaned...

This shortie post brought to you by: "Spring- when Momma has no time for blogging."
Seriously, Spring is crazy, but in a way that makes this Momma oh-so-happy.  I've been planting gardens, building beehives (have no bees yet, though), mulching, opening the pool, and cleaning buckets and buckets of tree debris and maple helicopters off every single inch of this three acres I own.  We have a joke here that there is always something falling here.  Truly though~ there is fall for the leaves falling, but there is also winter for gumballs and pine cones falling, spring for the azalea flowers, "tree sex junk" like maple helicopters, flowering tree debris, and some kind of weird grape-vine shaped pollen-y things that fall off the trees, as well.  Summer, there are tree branches blown down by the summer storms, and then in August we get crepe myrtle flowers and pine straw.  But for now, I'm loving all the beautiful new leaves and new garden experiments.
We are also trying to rent our other house, which makes for an extra busy Momma taking care of two yards and showing the rental to folks at their convenience. Today I have a showing at 10, meaning school isn't happening this morning and my morning chores have to squish in to a smaller time frame, and so told the kids they were going to be responsible for helping with a little extra housework than what they usually would do each morning.  In the asking, though, I think I've discovered an ingenious stratagem for getting my house cleaned that incorporates their constant jealousy and competition to my advantage in a way that would make Tom Sawyer proud...
Me: Okay here's what you need to do in addition to your normal morning work: I'm going to need the living room floor vacuumed, the kitchen floor swept and mopped, and the school room floor swept and the table cleaned up there.
All three kids at once: I WANNA VACUUM!
Me: Hannah gets to vacuum because it's her turn.  Sarah, you sweep the schoolroom and Caleb, you can swiffer the kitchen after Hannah does her normal after breakfast sweep in the kitchen.
Caleb: NO FAIR... I wanna vacuum!
Me [feigning graciousness]: Okay, well, I guess you could vacuum your room.  But only if you do a really good job cleaning the kitchen floor.
Caleb: YAY!
Sarah: But I don't get to vacuum!
Me [again feigning graciousness... seriously, how do they fall for this?]: Okay, well... I guess you could also vacuum your room, but only if you do the schoolroom, too.  And you'll need to clean up the stuff on the floor of your room before you vacuum it, so you may as well tidy up your room while the other two are busy with the vacuum.
Kids: Yay!

I just got 3/4 of my house vacuumed with a minimum of resistance, along with hard floors swept and rooms tidied.  Today, I win.  At least for the morning, anyway... let's not get too cocky.