It was an unusually quiet weekend here. Daughter is at college; Spouse and Boy-in-Black are gone for the week on a father/son trip. It was funny to be home with just the two youngest kids. Well, we did have a few extras: Blonde Niece, Skater Boy, and Philosophical Boy, but certainly the energy level of the household was way down without Boy-in-Black and his friends.
Saturday night, the fourteen-year-old crowd decided to go to Blonde Niece's house for a change because her Dad had the night off. That left me home with just two little kids, With-a-Why and Philosophical Boy. How nice and quiet it was!
Philosophical Boy is the one of the neighbor kids we go skiing with. He's With-a-Why's best friend. He's a smart, shy kid who often asks deep philosophical questions. Once when he was very young, he convinced Daughter that inertia was purple.
It's a luxury to have a quiet house. As much as I love my noisy family, it felt great to have a whole evening to myself. The two little boys sat on the living floor, engrossed in Complicated Card Game that involves Creatures Morphing into Other Creatures, and I decided to go on a cleaning binge. The kids and Spouse are pretty good about doing daily household chores, but they are all terrible when it comes to such things as cleaning out closets. I am the opposite. I hate daily chores (why wash the dishes if they are just going to get dirty again?), but I enjoy binge cleaning: tackling a closet, throwing stuff away, putting clothes in a bag to send to another family, that kind of a thing. Keeping all of our stuff to a minimum is the only way to keep this crowded household livable.
So I put on music, cleaned the refrigerator, the hall closet, and the laundry room. And felt perfectly happy. It felt wonderful to have time to myself, time to just listen to music and think.
The quiet will not last much longer. The kids have the week off, which means my out-of-town niece will be arriving to stay with me. And my Red-haired Sister will be coming in late tonight with her two young kids, and an extra. Skater Boy and Blonde Niece will be coming back over, as well as both of the neighbor kids. And I'm not sure who else. So it will be a busy week, especially since it's a week full of classes and meetings at school, and I am not sure how much time I will be able to spend with the crowd at my house, but I feel revived by the quiet Saturday night and I am looking forward now to the next whirlwind of activity.
3 comments:
Me too! Me too! I'm having the urge to re-organize the kitchen cabinets. Mr. Geeky doesn't mind the daily chores. He picks up here and there, cleans the kitchen, but he hates the cleaning projects. I love them!
I am also someone who prefers the deep cleaning exercises and isn't so good at the day-to-day. At least, that's how I am by nature. But the way things have shaken out I am responsible for all of the daily cleaning chores in our household--dishes, taking out garbage, cooking, grocery shopping, and pretty much everything else. I do all the laundry, but I do it as if it were a deep cleaning chore--about every couple of weeks, I start the morning by gathering every piece of dirty clothing in the house, making a big pile of them all, and then sorting them into small piles, and then I spend the rest of the day washing them. I'm only really happy if I finish the whole stack, and then it always bothers me that the clothes I'm actually wearing are dirty now. I think somehow I believe that if i could make every bit of clothing clean, I wouldn't have to wash them again. Doing the laundry this way causes one to spend too much time thinking about laundry, as you can tell...
I hate the repetition of daily stuff, especially laundry. We have a collie, so vaccuuming is undone in about 5 minutes, I kid you not. Plus the kids can trash a room in 60 seconds, so I think why bother? Then my Dad comes over to visit, and has to make leaps over obstacle courses of toys, shoes, coats, books and laundry. I am cleaing out the fridge today. We painted #3's room last night, for the same reason you cleaned the closet. Look what I have done-and you can't undo it! Okay I am going to hide the crayons, markers, and sharpies.
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