A Clean House... Well, A Cleaner House

House cleaning...hmmm...a subject most of us must approach, but we dread.

I suppose this post actually began to formulate somewhere around 1am this morning.  As I drifted off to sleep in the wee hours of the morning, I decided that the children and I would clean the house when we awoke.  As the day got started and the cleaning began, I realized that "house cleaning" was something that had changed drastically over the years for me.

When I first started out as a wife, I had a nice little schedule of house cleaning, you know the one where everything gets cleaned at least once a week.  The toilets and showers must be scrubbed, the floors swept and mopped.  Everything lived on a cleaning schedule.  For some reason at that point in my life I felt that this cleaning schedule was highly important.  When Randi came along, this schedule continued if not intensified.  It was though I became a control freak cleaning Nazi.

Then along came Toni and Bayleigh, and well.......

Hmmmm....how shall I put it?  I just wanted to survive..lol.

For about six months of my life I had 3 children under the age of 3yrs.  In my possession I had a 2.5yr old and two newborns.  For some reason housecleaning became less of priority.  I'll be honest, I don't remember a lot about the first 18 months with all of them.  I don't even know if the house ever was cleaned, let alone where the schedule of cleaning duties went.  I can merely remember days when I would lay my head down at night and thank the Lord that they were fed, clean, and sleeping, at least for a couple of hours.  

By the time Cody joined us, (Randi 5yrs, Toni and Bayleigh 3yrs), I had pretty much adopted the current cleaning schedule that is now in place in our home:  When it needs cleaning, we clean it, but we sure don't worry over it.  We have four children, and they are just that, children.  They laugh, they run, they play, and of course they make messes.  That's what they do, and I have vowed to let them be children for as long as they can.  We still clean the bathrooms, mop and vacuum the floors, and take care of other odds and ends, but there is no longer a schedule, and if it doesn't get done today, God knows it will still be there tomorrow.  We clean up the spills when they happen in order to make room for new messes.  Their lives and mine will not be consumed with whether or not our home is spotless.  Life is too short to be consumed with cleaning, and much like the days when Toni, Bayleigh, and Randi were tiny, when I lay my head upon my pillow, I thank the Lord that they are fed, clean, and sleeping.