Consider me panicked

You know what I found when cleaning up the house today? A pen cap. But not just any pen cap. The pen cap to a black permanent marker. If my life had a soundtrack, you'd be listening to a menacing "duh-duh-DUH" right now.

Everything's coming up rosy

Since K is now using M's twin bed, she's been stuck with his old blue sheets. I really did try to find her cute girly sheets, but everything I could find was only a cotton/polyester blend. Which just doesn't fly for me. Really, am I supposed to prefer wrinkle-free sheets to soft cotton sheets? Unless this means I won't get more wrinkly, I'll pass.

So being the resourceful (i.e. cheap) person that I am, I bought some fabric dye. After a long and stressful process, I produced two batches of dark pink sheets. Brilliant! K was so very pleased to have her very own sheets, and she didn't seem to mind at all that they were all different shades of dark pink and none of them the pretty pink purple I promised. Good thing kids have short memories. I myself was extremely proud that I managed to dye them without dying myself or anything else, and that my washer did not, at any time, produce another load as pink.

Until now. Apparently I celebrated too soon, because now I have a load full of pinkish clothes, including the sheets to our bed, a pair of B's jeans, and one very pink M sock. I couldn't even luck out and have two pink socks, so that K could use them. So this weekend's project? Un-dyeing, which feels just as stressful/water-wasteful/tedious as the original dye job. Cotton/polyester is sounding better all the time.

As if laundry wasn't vicious enough already

In case you were wondering:
(1) You can indeed give yourself a cardboardcut, the nasty and thankfully less often seen relative of the papercut.
(2) Cardboardcuts bleed more than a papercut. A lot more.
(3) Trying to spray laundry stains while bleeding on said laundry creates a very vicious cycle.

But I don't FEEL relaxed

So you get to nap time, wondering blissfully whether you will relax by exercising or writing. Then you throw some dirty clothes out in the laundry on your way to relaxation. What is that bag out there? How can this be? The realization spreads across you like a cracked egg on your head. If you leave a bag of vomity, poopy clothes out in the garage for an entire day and night, they will still be there! No one comes to rinse them out! No one comes to soak them in bleach or throw them into the wash! They will just sit there, waiting, getting stinkier and more stained despite the fact that you are really not in the mood to revisit any portion of the last twenty-four hours! The nerve!

So the answer is, you will get out that bleach and get those clothes in the wash. Because cleaning up is relaxing, too. Right? Right??

Home is where the mop is

I just finished mopping the floors, at least the ones far enough away from the bedrooms. After two events in four days, they needed it. Badly. I spent the whole time thinking about my friends who have housekeepers. It's a scarily high number.

I've come close to getting a housekeeping a few times, even took down the number and nearly called. It would give me more time to write--maybe even make a buck or two--and more time to rest in the short periods that I have free. But the truth is, I like to be the one cleaning our house. Not that I like cleaning. I mean, I do like the end result of shiny floors and shelves put back in dusted order, but it's time consuming and tiring and endless. Ever so endless. But I like to do the cleaning. As I clean, I think of the feet that came across that floor: friends and their children happily running to the playroom, a holiday party with a house fully filled, Ivory dusted kids coming in from making their first little snowmen. I think about the cookies that made those crumbs, the hands that left those fingerprints. I realize how solid our home is: how the floor feels under my hands (scratched and dented as it might be), how tight the corners and doors, how much space is ours.

Cleaning makes me realize and appreciate what we have. I know there are lots of factors that play into people getting housekeepers, such as age and jobs and physical capabilities and time, but if I'm not doing it, someone else would be. They would still put out an insane amount of time and effort just to take care of of something for which I no longer made time. Only it'd just be a job for them. So at least when I clean, I come away remembering I have something, a whole microcosm of tangible and intangible memories, right here at my fingertips. Pass by the rug and remember sitting on it and entertaining M in an empty room as the floors were installed around us. Dust off the shelves to find myself staring at the old photo of B and I back when we were just kids ourselves. Clean out the playroom to find a leftover party treat. I know they're just things--trash, dirt, relics--but at the same time, they aren't just things. I love that I still remember, sometimes, that they are underneath. I'll live to regret this, I know, but I kind of hope that if it ever gets to be too much for me to handle myself, that I'll realize, maybe, that I didn't need quite so much in the first place.