Cleaning the House Stinks

So. I have a confession. I didn't clean the house after my post the other day. But I did go through and fold three hundred loads of clothes and pick up everything by this afternoon when I went to pick Jman up at preschool. I also made the beds. Now I really do need to go this afternoon to pick up vacuum cleaner bags so that I can do that tomorrow. There. I admit it. I'm not the best house cleaner in the world.

You know why? I don't really like cleaning the house. It just gets dirty again. Really, really fast. For instance, I dust and by the next morning, there is another layer of it. And I'm like, "Seriously? I just dusted you bedroom furniture, family room furniture, you name it and it's dusty furniture. . ."

And we have Quincy. If you look at him wrong, he sheds off a whole layer of fur. I'm not kidding. And he takes his lovely "babies" and he runs them along the walls and they get a gorgeous dirty smudge running the whole length of them. Over and over again. How do I train him not to do that? Plus, he is a lab. Labs smell bad. It's a requirement of the breed. If, before they are born, God looks at them and says, "And do you promise to always smell smelly, even if you just had a bath five minutes before?", and that little puppy looks up into God's beautiful face and says, "Um, no I just don't think I can do that. . ." He turns them into a cat. I know it's true. And the smell contributes to the unclean vibe in the house.

Plus, we get a lot of paper in this house. Papers from preschool. Papers from the mail that include a bazillion pieces of junk mail, advertisements and other sundry bits of mail that I don't know what to do with. Papers that have coupons, or action items or blah blah blah. It just accumulates. I can't keep up with it all.

Laundry. Same as dirt. It just piles up. And it's a never ending pile. I get to the bottom of the hamper and by the end of the day it's half full. And the cycle starts all over again. I told Jamey this weekend that I was going to take one weekend this winter and declare it "Wear the EXACT Same Clothes You Put on, on Friday All Weekend" weekend. Down to underwear. Gross I know, but I would love to have a clean laundry hamper for more than five minutes one day. The laundry just adds to the messiness of the house because I also don't like putting it away (for the same reasons I don't like doing it - if I keep up with the laundry, I also have to keep up with putting it away.) So sometimes, like this past weekend, I had about four loads of laundry sitting in various stages of foldedness sitting in my family room. For the entire weekend.

And then of course we have Joshua. He spills syrup on the table every morning. Yogurt on the table at lunch every afternoon. Ranch dressing on the table at every dinner. It gets depressing wiping up the table so many times. I think I'm getting "Wiping Up the Table Elbow". He brings home a sandbox full of sand in his shoes from preschool every day. And every day I forget that is the case and he takes them off in our family room and gets it all over the rug. And I won't even start to discuss the messes I find in the bathroom, lest you run from this post screaming.

Does it sound like I am complaining? Maybe. But I'm really not. Mostly. But if it sounds a little like complaining, it's only because I have to go grocery shopping today. Like I do what seems like almost every day. Gee now that I think about it, grocery shopping and cleaning the house are very similar. But at least at the grocery store, they give out free cookies. . .