Tuesday, February 22, 2011

WWLD?

Yesterday was a holiday, no school, no work, just a whole day for family laziness and general hanging-outedness. We watched a movie, played with Play-doh, did some crafts, built Lego and watched a full blown Jedi-war. It was a good day, but this morning we were back to our routine of getting up, getting dressed and getting out the door.

Mr. Awesome went to work, the kids went to school and after a meeting I went grocery shopping and returned home. When I stepped through the door, for a moment I thought we had been robbed. Paper was scattered from one end of the entrance to the other, cheerios covered the kitchen floor and the living room floor was scattered with books.

As I walked through the house I noticed that all of the closets were open with their contents spilling out all over the floor, giving the impression that the closets had thrown up in the night. There was doll clothes, Lego, glue sticks, glitter, hot wheels, Teck Deck, DVD cases, playing cards, marbles, sweatshirts, socks, snack wrappers, Zhu Zhu pets, tissue paper and Playmobile everywhere. In the bathroom I found a half finished science experiment and seven Babies floating in two inches of water in the bathtub. In the laundry room I found a fort made of comforters and pillows stretching from one end of the room to the other and the floor of the guest room was the scene of some sort of doll and bear mass casualty event.

My house was a mess ... with a capital Holy Crap!

I contemplated running away from home, burning the place down or using the snow shovel to push everything back into the closets. Then I asked myself, "WWLD?" What would Loonette do? When they were younger, my kids LOVED Big Comfy Couch and the '10 second tidy' became a staple of our clean up routine. As I surveyed the mess, I knew it was going to take a heck of a lot longer than 10 seconds to clean up, so I set myself up a '10 minute tidy' goal and went to work.

In under ten minutes I had almost all of the mess pitched back into the mess-makers rooms, swept the kitchen and fished all of the Barbies out of the East River. The science experiment was left where it was because I have no desire to see a real explosion and meltdown but the crime scene in the guest room was moved to Crafty's room and the trail of mess from Dude's room to Mischief's room was divided and pushed back behind closed doors.

My house, my living space is once again returned to order and the mess has once again become the mess-makers problem, and not mine. Thanks Loonette for the tip ... now time for coffeejuice and some crafting!

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