The Beast is Back!

After being gone for almost three weeks...the Beast just showed up in our yard last night!  Everyone, especially the kids, is incredibly happy to have her home.  So we again have short grey hair on the carpet, dog food crumbs in the living room floor, and trails of water around the kitchen...and it's completely worth it!

Sugar and Spice and Everything Nice...right?

In the old nursery rhyme, little girls are made of sugar and spice and everything nice.  Well, today I deep-cleaned the girls' room, and let me tell you...there was not a bit of any of that in sight.  What DID I find?  Spiders, snails, and puppy dog [hair].  I think the writer of the nursery rhyme was confused.

Action Plan:
1.  Clean light fixture
2.  Dust all surfaces
3.  Clean window
4.  Wipe down doors
5.  Clean baseboards
6.  Vacuum

First of all:  the light fixture was done immediately, so I had no excuse to say later that I forgot about it.

I dusted the room, and it seemed like it was more dusty than other parts of the house.  It also seems to be the warmest room in the house because of a large window, so I wonder whether that has something to do with the air conditioning unit's attempt to work in overdrive.

The window took more scrubbing than the ones in other rooms have.  The Best likes (liked?) to sit with her head propped on the window sill and her nose pressed to the glass, which meant a lot of dirt and smudges to deal with.  It was when I opened the window to clean the tracks, though, that I got my biggest surprise.  The girls' window sits just over our "garden" -- a small patch of mulched dirt with a few sago palms and flowers growing in it.  My theory is that the bugs, frogs, and grime I found in the window originated in the garden.  The window track was coated with some sort of green slime that probably came from the sprinkler.  I know that we have lots of little frogs around, especially in the summer; several met their ends stuck between the window glass and the screen of the girls' bedroom.  And, yes, there were dead spiders and a snail.  (I have no idea how the snail got there; however, I have seen one in the garden before, so my theory is that s/he somehow climbed the brick and entered in at a crevice.)

I pulled out a new tool when wiping down the doors today:  my Up & Up "magic eraser" from Target.  Those things are fantastic for removing fingerprints, pencil and crayon marks, and muddy streaks from both doors and walls.

Cleaning the baseboards was uneventful, but things got interesting again when it was time to vacuum.  Cuddles and Mini-me entered the room, and they both wanted to help me vacuum the floor.  There was almost a fight over it.  This is the documentation:  when they are teenagers and try to shirk their chores, I will remind them that there once was a day when they fought for the privilege of doing them!

One Down

I mentioned all the conspirators who contribute to the constant mess in the house...but I want to be clear that I love each of them, and cleaning up after each of them is more than worth their company.

This week, we lost our dog.  The Beast wandered out of the yard, and has last been seen several miles from our house.  We've looked for her for several days now, and it's like she's vanished.  Despite ads online, phone calls to local vets and animal control, and the combined strength of Facebook friends, we have yet to find her.

It's pretty sad; Mini-me, especially, is asking where she is and is saying that she misses her.  Yesterday she started coloring a picture and said it was for The Beast when she came home.  I had to stop myself from sniffling.

The house IS cleaner without her.  There are no trails of water drops across the linoleum in the kitchen; there are no dog food crumbs in the middle of the kitchen carpet; there is no dog hair on the base of the couch.  But you know what?  I wish there was.  The house feels eerily quiet and sterile without her in it.  Sometimes I glance around and find myself wondering, "Where's the dog?"  I wonder how long it will take me to get used to the idea that she's not here?  I wonder if I'll even need to?  I am still holding out hope that she'll show back up, but I don't know how long to do so; I also don't know at what point I should start gently telling the kids that she might not be coming back.

Living room

Day 3:  The Living Room

Our house has what's called an open floor plan.  I'm not entirely sure what that means in architectural terms, but it appears to mean that the common areas -- living room, dining room, and kitchen -- are all basically segments of a single, large room.  It makes our house look bigger, but it also made decorating a bit of a pain.  It also means that my first few days' effort at cleaning the largest part of our house required me to tackle a different portion of the same room each day.

The living room is longer than it is wide, so we have partitioned it off with a couch and a book case.  One side is considered the actual living room, and the other side is our office/play area.  Today, I tackled the living room itself.

Here's the action plan:

1.  Take down and wash curtains

2.  Attempt to clean the blinds AGAIN

3.  Wash insides of windows and window tracks

4.  Clean fan and light fixture

5.  Clean fireplace

6.  Dust all furniture

7.  Vacuum floor

8.  Steam clean carpet

After cleaning the breakfast nook on my first day of work, I knew what to expect with the windows.  When I removed the curtains, I encountered dust and cobwebs.  That didn't particularly please me, but I also wasn't surprised.  A quick trip through the washing machine ended up taking care of the curtains, but I still have yet to find a successful way to clean the blinds.  I earnestly tried to wipe each individual blind piece down with a cloth, but they still didn't come clean.  My Love says that this size blinds cost $5.95 at Lowe's; there may be a few new sets in our future.

Cleaning the fan and lights was an uneventful task except that I was unable to hide the fact that I was climbing something from the kids.  Mini-me stood at the base of the chair and kept up a running dialogue: "Mama, what are you doing?"

"I'm cleaning, sweetie."

"What are you cleaning?"

"I'm cleaning the lights and the fan."

"Oh...how did they get dirty?"

"They just did.  They got dusty, and I need to get the dust off."

"Oh...can I help?"

"No, honey, you're too short."

"But I can climb up on a chair like you and reach them."

"Sweetie, you'd need a bigger chair than this one to be able to reach the lights."

"Well, you could go buy me one."

Eventually, I set she and Cuddles down at the dining room table with some play dough that they had found in an Easter egg hunt at their grandparents' house over the weekend.  They were content to make "crackers", "pancakes", and "pretzels" for the next half hour (at which point, obviously, it was time for lunch).

The "most dirty place in the room" award goes to our fireplace.  I found that incredibly interesting, since it hasn't been used since we moved into the house over four years ago.  It doesn't really get cold enough to need fires around here, and we also don't want to worry with cleaning up ashes or keeping little fingers out of the grate.  I figured I might find some dust in the fireplace, but no real dirt.  Oh, was I wrong!   To begin, I removed a decorative candle stand that we keep in there to keep it from looking stark.  The top few coils were laced with spider webs covered in dust.  As a side note, I abhor spiders.  They make me scream and run the other direction.  I almost stopped cleaning right then, but the fact that the webs were dusty led me to believe that the spider had likely already met his or her demise.  I was correct; I later discovered his/her body underneath a candle that had been lit at Valentine's Day.  As to the task at hand:  I wiped down the candle stand with ACV, which was equally effective at removing dust, spider webs, and ash.  I then wiped down the inside of the fireplace itself.  To my surprise, our flue was open (and I have no idea how it got that way).  I closed the flue, and when I did, a shower of ash fell into the fireplace.  It was actually quite a chore to wipe it all out; when ash gets wet, it simply makes gray and black streaks, so I went through multiple cleaning rags and bowls of ACV in order to get it clean.  My last fireplace task was to dust our screen.  This proved to be the most difficult thing I've done yet other than cleaning the blinds.  Dust particles clung to the mesh screen when I wiped them with the ACV.  I ended up brushing the screen vigorously ("Mama, why are you hitting that?") to dislodge the dust.  That just made the dust float in the air, but I was hoping that whatever surface it landed on would be easier to clean.

A quick pass over the furniture with Pledge and a rag, and I was ready to vacuum.  Yes, again...the Beast had left a trail of dog food crumbs from her bowl to the couch, and the floor looked just as dirty as it had before I vacuumed yesterday.  There was no help from the kids today, as they were busy with peanut-butter-and-local-honey sandwiches (which they would rather than than just about anything else I could make).  And then I paused; in a strange twist of events, steam cleaning the carpets has become My Love's job.  (The one time I tried I left puddles in the carpet.)

It was really pleasant for me to discover that most of the house isn't going to be as dirty as the kitchen was; dusting and vacuuming are chores I actually keep up with pretty consistently, and I'm hopping it will pay off as I work toward having the entire house cleaned at one time.

The Culprits

Sometimes I look at pictures of homes in magazines and comfort myself by thinking that no one actually lives in those rooms. Who, really, has white couches or shag carpets or $200 (breakable) umbrella stands next to the front door? Certainly no one with children or large animals in the house.

That said, I'm afraid it's going to sound, as I write, like my house is a cesspool of dust mites that guests should enter at their own risk. It's not that bad, really; it's just not as GOOD as I want it to be, and that's due in large part to our home's inhabitants, most of whom do all they can to make the house look "lived in" (a euphemism for dingy).

My Love

My husband and I have been married for nearly six years, and we dated for six years before that...so I definitely knew what I was getting myself into when I married a recovering slob. (I cried when he took me to his bachelor pad after the honeymoon.) Our deal is that he can keep his half of our bedroom however he wants, as long as the rest of the house is presentable. That said, he is completely in charge of outdoor lawn maintenance and cleaning. He is also amazingly versatile and selfless, vacuuming or doing dishes for me when I'm busy, stressed, or 40 weeks pregnant. However, he also consistently assures me that the house is more than clean enough for his preferences.

Mini-me

My oldest daughter is nearly five, and, to hear anyone from my extended family talk, she is exactly like I was at her age. Specifically, she likes to climb high things and then jump off, run barefoot through the mud, pick up slugs, and spin wildly in circles in the living room. She has a tom-boy-ish tendency toward enjoying a little mud in her life, but she is starting to enjoy helping me clean house; she can also be counted on to clean up her own messes (with some prodding).

Cuddles

My second daughter is two, and as different from the first as is possible within one family. Where Mini-me is independent, Cuddles is clingy; where Mini-me is energetic, Cuddles is mellow. She's learning to feed herself, which means that her booster seat has a constant parade of dried yogurt, graham cracker crumbs, and spilled apple juice underneath it. She's also notorious for pulling out everything in the toy box in search of a favorite teddy bear.

Baby Boy

Luckily for me, I have one child who's not mobile. This happy guy spends the bulk of his time playing in an infant bouncer or rolling back and forth on a play mat. However, he has a propensity toward enormous quantities of spit-up, so most feedings are followed by a quick cleaning of the floor.

The Beast

We own what our vet calls "the smallest Great Dane [he's] ever seen." Weighing in at just over 100 pounds, this gentle giant loves laying in the sun and napping in the hallway next to the kids' rooms. However, though she has short hair, she does shed. On rainy days she leaves streaks of mud from the back yard on our well-worn carpet. Also, she has an absolutely crazy tendency: she takes mouthfuls of food from her bowl, lays down in the middle of the living room, and eats the food, leaving crumbs in her wake that pretty much always make the living room look dirty.

So, there you have it...with a family of five, three young children, and a big dog, I'm going to assume that the bulk of the clutter and dust in our house is normal. Normal, but not necessarily inevitable; I'm off to conquer it! (Cue inspirational music.)