Home Again!

I had to look to see when my last post was. Last week was crazy, and I definitely didn’t do as well at just keeping up with the daily tasks as I wanted to do.

Oh well. Life continues.

Friday was a half day of school, but the morning included a two-hour sing-a-long at the school, so really I only had one hour between that and pick up time to frantically clean house before the boys were home and it was time to load up the car for our trip to have my side of the family’s “Christmas weekend.”

Now, normal people would also have been lamenting the crazy schedule, and would also have run home to clean. I’m definitely not claiming to have achieved “normal” yet. But I did it. I went home and cleaned for almost an hour.

If this is normal for some people, I’ll explain why it is such an accomplishment for me. Prior to this process, I never would have thought it would be worth it to clean for an hour when I also needed to pack for five people to go away for the weekend. I remember talking to a friend who had cleaned her house before leaving on vacation and thinking she was absolutely crazy.

And before, one hour wouldn’t have made enough of a dent to be worth it.

But my house was getting very messy after all the activities and craziness of last week, and because most of the time I’ve been doing better, I knew that an hour of cleaning could make a real difference. It needed to be straightened, not shoveled.

I also knew how nice it would feel to walk into a neat home. But I was wrong. I didn’t know how nice it would feel. It felt fantastic.

I walked in and actually stopped in my tracks. It was an emotional experience to enter a neat, although not perfect, home. It was welcoming and very peaceful.

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve joked to hubby when we’ve returned from a vacation that someone must have ransacked our house while we were gone. Many times I’ve wondered if we would even notice if we’d been robbed, because of the chaos.

So although I can’t claim that last week was a great success in this “coming clean” process, I’m going to enjoy and be proud of this small, but real milestone.