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| image here I saw this on instagram just after we finished our whole-house-clean-sweep and it seemed very fitting :) |
I had an ambitious goal in January (which then moved forward to February) to get all the rooms in the house clean (meaning tidy) at the same time, and this past weekend we did it!
Kathie helped me think a little better about my goal when she mentioned that trying to get everything tidy all at once may require everyone to freeze in place (we learned as we worked that this was true :) And it reminded me of my friend Gloria who used to help us with cleaning. She was a lifesaver as she came every other week and scrubbed and cleaned the things that felt impossibly overwhelming to ever get scrubbed or cleaned! For several weeks after she'd started, I'd constantly be apologizing for the messes though, and she finally said to me, "Debbie, you live here! And you have a dear family that lives here!"
With a little better perspective, it was still fun to reach our goal - twice even! One Friday and Saturday we just went through the house room-by-room all together and got everything tidied up. Jordan came up with a fun (75% of the kids would agree) plan with activity breaks in between each room to keep everyone motivated. It did require a few re-do passes before we were really done (particularly due to one 2-year-old who wasn't 100% on board with the plan!) Then we went through again the next day and it was happy to see how much more quickly it all went the second time.
We may not repeat this again (at least till next January when the clean-everything-feeling is back), but it was nice to know it was possible! And even though we had mixed levels of support from the kids, one even asked "can we do this every day? because then it would always be pretty easy!"
I think we probably won't take him up on that, but we did enjoy a very short time with a very tidy house -- but I think we'll just keep living here and making messes and tidying up :)
