How to Clean your House with Kids

Obviously if it has come to this, you must be desperate and your attempts to hold car washes and bake sales to hire that live-in maid or sisterwife you’ve begged your husband for have failed. You have my deepest sympathy.

Step 1:

Lower your expectations. Your house will probably always smell like peanut butter. And there are no Pinterest boards that match a basket of stuffed animals with your French country décor, I've looked.

I don’t want to brag, but in the past week I’ve earned my Girl Scout merit badge in Good Housekeeping, when everyday my realtor texted requesting showing after showing. I’d answer from within a pillow fort while simultaneously picking crayon flecks out of the carpet and my child’s teeth. Needless to say my house just doesn’t happen to be clean at 3pm on a Tuesday, it takes some serious effort.

Even in the wake of careful planning your filthy dog may still find a way to dig out of the neighbor’s yard and come to your front door in the middle of your open house, while peeing on the welcome mat as a way of welcoming those potential buyers to their new home (true story).

Step 2:

Temporarily hand off your children and dogs to achieve a temporarily clean home. Post pictures of them on social media skipping in meadows or helping the homeless in hopes that someone will offer to take them off your hands for an hour.

Aren't they adorable?

Step 3:

Confuse your kids into thinking that cleaning is the same as going to Disneyland, using high pitched vocal intonations reserved for sorority sleep overs. When that fails, you’d be amazed what your kids will do for gummy bears.

Step 4:

Resolve that threatening to run away to Mexico if you have to pick up the toilet brush one more time is not a real solution. Cleaning is part of your past, present and future. Lastly and most importantly, even if you consider yourself a part of a highly evolved equal partnership, whichever way the cookie crumbles someone will ultimately have to vacuum it up.

EXCUSE ME, YOUR HOUSE IS SHOWING

On a scale of 1 to ridiculous, trying to show your house to sell, when you have two dogs and two toddlers is giraffe. What, that doesn’t make any sense? Yeah, neither does saying “please stop licking the couch with a mouth full of popsicle” for the fourth time in a row, but this is my life now. Let me start by saying that my family is incredibly blessed. We are moving from our big beautiful home, into another big beautiful home and every day I pinch myself (or rather my kids do that) just to make sure I’m not dreaming. No part of this is me complaining, but attempting to clean and organize at the level you need to while your house is on the market, with a house full of squirrelly children is like brushing your teeth while eating a box of Oreos.

The only time my kids are not making a mess, is when they are restrained in their car seats or sleeping. My threshold for what I used to consider chaotic, would now be a welcomed trip to the spa, as this process has quickly become my 5th child. On the plus side, I’m happy to report I’ve reached a new level of responsible adult, I now have to make my bed daily, something I haven’t done since my allowance depended on it. My to-do list starts with not letting my kids wipe their snot on the white towels and ends with picking up doggie landmines in the backyard. To make matters even more challenging, my youngest is in the "Mama" stage so anytime I even attempt to do anything resembling productivity it looks exactly like this...

I also need to paint the picture of our two dogs, remember them? Don’t worry, I forgot too until I realized they would bark incessantly at any visitors taking a tour and somehow a yapping dog doesn’t exactly translate to “welcome to your new home”. They are our original babies, but boy did we drop the ball on training them properly. Our Cocker Spaniel is so cute that if she were to run away, someone would definitely keep her and our Beagle just wants to go wherever there is food (one of Charlotte’s first sentences was “Lola is fat”). Anytime there is a gate or door open they have escaped out of here faster than you can say, What is the opposite of Homeward Bound? Our amazing neighbor is letting us keep them in her backyard during showings, otherwise I would have “accidentally” left our front door open the night Lola decided to eat an entire lasagna while standing on our kitchen table.  

We haven’t even begun to enter the world of packing, and pulling things out of boxes is actually one of my kid’s favorite activities, so stay tuned for that part of our epic adventure. I hope I continue to find humor and strength in-between my sessions of curling up in the fetal position in our perfectly color coordinated walk-in closet.

You're Welcome, Mama Earth!

I try and be as much of a “crunchy” mom as I can stomach. I believe in breastfeeding and eco-friendly disposable diapers. But there are many ways as a mom that I have unconsciously began to help the planet out of sheer laziness, necessity or my version of waving my mommy white flag.  

We drive less. Not because I worry about my non-Prius carbon footprint, but because just the thought of loading and unloading my kids to and from their car seats, is enough to get to me to stay home.

We feed the wildlife. Everywhere we go, we leave a trail of goldfish crackers in our wake. Some lucky dogs, ducks and squirrels are getting to reap the benefits of my laziness and the fact that we buy in bulk from Costco.

I pick up trash. When we are out on a walk to the park, you better believe, if there is a cigarette butt on the ground it will end up in my children’s mouths. So instead of introducing them to nicotine at the ages of 3 and 1.5, I pick up garbage. All I'm missing is a stylish reflective orange vest.

Speaking of trash, every toddler I know has a love of garbage cans. Perhaps they are part raccoon, but one of my children’s first human tricks was to put items in the garbage or the recycling and to know the difference between the two. It is less impressive when they return with a rotten banana peel that they’ve retrieved out of the trash.

We re-purpose rain water into a white trash swimming pool which also doubles as a bath/ sandpit.

Since having children, I’ve never done a “half a load” of laundry. I even had to Google the term, because I assumed “half” meant throwing half of the baby clothes in with the wet towels they decided to pull into the bathtub while it was full.

So to you Mother Earth, from one Mama to another, we are doing our part to help you out.