Cleaning: Is There Any Point?

I often feel like all my efforts to clean my house are in vain. As soon as I fill a bin full of toys, my son dumps it out. Or he'll do it mid-fill. On purpose, of course. He loves to empty things.

I seriously think he crawls around to mess up whatever I just cleaned.

Emma can be the same way. Of course, toys are more interesting once Mom puts them away, right? But at least Emma knows how to pick them up again. Not that I'm consistent with making sure that happens...which is why it rarely does unless I'm the one doing it.

And I don't do it as much as I should because it seems a pointless venture. Cleaning in general seems that way. The toys especially.

I spent ALL day Wednesday cleaning my house last week. ALL DAY. I swept, mopped, vacuumed, scrubbed the counters and stove, cleaned the toilet, picked up toys, tidied, etc. Basically everything but my bedroom and the tub. And I still haven't done them. They're kind of the last-to-be-cleaned places around here. But now, I need to do everything all over again. And it hasn't even been a week.

Why can't homes come with a self-cleaning button? You know, like some ovens do? Mine, of course, does not.

John and I joke about the self-cleaning button being on the money tree. If only we could find it.

I am not one of those must-clean-all-the-time people. I like having a clean house, sure, but I don't want to spend my life cleaning. I'd rather do other things like play with my kids. It'd be better if my house could just magically get clean and STAY clean.

So, my house was nice and clean on Wednesday. Guess what happened Thursday?

First, Hyrum made a HUGE mess with baby food. I let him have the bowl by himself. He scooped baby food into his mouth with his hand. Of course, he also got it ALL over himself and the table. Naturally, this necessitated a bath...

During said bath, Emma purposefully dumped a HUGE cup of bath water on my freshly mopped floor. Oh, I was MAD.

Then, I discovered that a garbage bag had leaked onto the floor. Yuck.

And THEN Hyrum got ahold of one of Emma's crackers at snack time in the 2 seconds I wasn't looking and started choking on it. He's fine. But he dislodged it by throwing up on my kitchen floor. Thankfully it was on the tile. But he got a little on the carpet where it's fraying.

Sidenote: I put in a maintenance order for the fraying carpet and the window latch in the kids' room that doesn't work properly. I put the order in a few weeks ago. They haven't come by to even LOOK at it, so last Monday I went down to the office to ask about it...and the managers moved. Like, the manager's apartment is completely empty. So...I can't help but wonder if/when my request will ever happen. I don't know when the new managers are moving in, but you better believe I'll pounce on them when they do.

Also, the people who built our apartment were either stupid or too cheap to care about fraying carpet. Or both. If they installed it right, it wouldn't fray like that...and Emma wouldn't have cut her big toe on the NAIL that was supposed to hold that stupid fraying carpet down.

Aaaanyway. I digress. Back to cleaning stuff.

On Friday, I let Hyrum hold the jar of baby food while I got the spoon out. You can see where this is going, can't you? Yeah...he dropped it. It shattered. Green beans and glass ALL over the kitchen floor.

Of course, this is all on top of the normal daily living messes like dishes and toys and such.

Emma's birthday party is this week. I need to clean for it, of course. But right now, there's not much point until the day before or the day of.

Maybe I should work on the not-so-immediate areas that get neglected. Like my bedroom. Our room always gets trashed. Everything we want to hide when company comes over goes in there. I have so many papers to sort through and organize. Some to file, some to throw out. I'm also hiding the kids' birthday and Christmas presents in our room, along with the supplies for Emma's party and all the wrapping paper and such.

*sigh* I should probably get working on that. Or maybe start on some dinner instead.