Thursday 29 November 2012

Clean this


I'm still high on the fumes.
As the temperature here in Melbourne reached a steamy 39 degrees (that's 102 degrees for you non-metric fahrenheiters) I decided to clean. Of course.

The inside of my house is cool enough - not yet Fonzie cool - but refrigerated cool enough to do so. And, I'm feeling a bit electric and buzzy like a 3 year old on a double espresso. I get like that sometimes. Not often, thank God, but sometimes. But it makes me do stupid things like clean my house.

I've been busting my arse fruitlessly cleaning it. I started with my shower. We'd forgotten it was white. Now when people pop in (I soooo love the pop ins) I want to now steer them away from the dog's breakfast that is the rest of my house and lead them to my bathroom for a coffee as proof that I do actually clean now and then.

My goal is that the house will be clean by Christmas Day, when the relatives descend. Christmas Day here...well...that's another blog. I'll need a few drinks first before I write that one. 

Spring cleaning for me means to prepare the house for festivities, when on Christmas Day, after the kids have shredded the wrapping paper and packaging from their little-deserved presents, strewn ribbon, cardboard and those tiny plastic ties that hold the heads of dolls that will instil a body image complex in the twins in a few years time, the house will be back in it's late November stage of disarray and the whole cleaning exercise will been deemed pointless and a waste of fecking time.

Ordinarily, when I clean the house for Christmas, it is a last minute affair. Basically, that means we gather up all the crap on Christmas Eve and throw it in a wardrobe or two, or banish it to my bedroom upstairs and out of sight. The problem with that method is that all that crap is still there tucked in their hiding places from Christmasses past.
Lily (above) & Grace were very
lucky to have made it to their
2nd birthday. A year & a half later
& I'm still finding Coco Pops behind the
TV, along with pizza, spoons, etc.

Cleaning my house is no different to painting the Sydney Harbour Bridge. It is continuous and monotonous. There's no chance to sit back and enjoy my hard work. All I do is create a blank canvas for the tornado twins.

I find myself apologising to friends who, bless them, arrive unannounced. "Sorry about the mess. You should have popped in yesterday. It was clean then". 

I've come a long way with cleaning. Or lack of it. When Ella was born, we had just moved into a brand spanking new house. When someone came over they were greeted with a display home. This was a dead give away to the Maternal and Child Health nurse who checked on me to see if I was coping ok, and saw that I wasn't, in fact, ok. That and the fact that the toaster was sparkling clean on the inside. And that I had stayed up the night before frantically cleaning the tooth brushes and the grout around the toilet tiles just in case I was found to be a bad parent if they showed signs of germs. You never know who could scrutinise your toothbrush at any time. You have to be ready for that. 

Look around my house now and you'll see how well I have recovered from that kind of manic behaviour.

Yep, this is pretty much a normal day.
Lily said Campbell did it. Gracie said Ella did it.
Campbell & Ella were at school.
It seems my kids learn to fib through their back teeth early.
You feel my pain? Do ya?

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2 comments:

  1. Loving your recovery, see how well you're doing x Thanks, I now have another way of explaining why my cleaning's followed the same process of evolving :)

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  2. I love the second photo and the accompanying blame game that went with it.

    It has to be genetic. I seem to recall a certain brother carving 'Lisa did this' into a window pane when we were kids...although I have a theory you did the carving to get him in trouble. Perhaps you (window) framed him.

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