Cleaning

There's something about having Darren home to myself for a whole week that renders me completely useless and unproductive. We spent much of the past few days outside, playing with our kids and working on our yard and garden (yay!). We sat around a lot, laughing and talking and just hanging out. But laundry, for instance? I was caught up before we left for Albuquerque last weekend, but have only done the bare essentials since then (socks and underwear ranking right up there, second only to clean scrubs that I needed for work.) Darren returned to work yesterday, but, having worked Sunday night, I was still pretty much good for nothing. In fact, my kids and I took a three hour long nap yesterday afternoon and Darren was shocked--shocked!--to find all of us still sleeping when he got home from work last night.

But today. Today is an altogether different story! Despite an initially bad start to my morning (I am so not used to this time change yet), I am rejuvenated and, thanks in large part to Jennifer, motivated to get this house back into order. What began this morning as a simple housekeeping chore--stripping my bedsheets to be freshly laundered--resulted in a complete reconfiguration of my master bedroom. (No small task when accomplished alone!) My kids were so excited. They had great fun crawling on and around all the furniture as I vacuumed baseboards and washed walls and fixtures. I am so, so happy with the end result! I'd post a picture, but Darren hasn't seen it yet and I don't want to ruin the surprise. And surprised he'll be! Dylan keeps telling me how much he loves it, exclaiming over how much more room there seems to be and saying happily that he "can't wait" to sleep in here tonight. (Wait a second now...whose room is this again?!) :)

After lunch, Dylan and I got started on his room. He is just so irresistibly cute! When I told him this morning that we were going to be doing some spring cleaning, worried that he might resist the idea, he caught me completely off guard by responding cheerfully and with great enthusiasm. "Oh, good!" he said. "I've heard about spring cleaning before on Winnie the Pooh! This is going to be a fun chore!".

And, true to his word, he has been such a tremendous help! I brought a large cardboard box in from the garage and explained to him that we needed to sort through his toys to eliminate the ones that are broken, missing pieces, or that he no longer plays with. With little encouragement from me, he got right to it. "This one is scary," he said, tossing a soft plastic finger puppet into the box. "We don't really need this anymore," he explained as he tossed a football into the box. "Broken,"...toss. "Too silly,"...toss. And then, as he picked up a tiny, squishy, green rubber frog, "Oh, no, this is a choking hazard!"....toss! I am so proud of him! I only wish it was as easy for me to let go of "things". I'm working on it!

Meghan's asleep now and I'm eager to get back to work! With such eager and willing assistants this is much more fun than I thought it would be!