So is it weird that I’ve considered pulling an all nighter to get my house in order?
When I was in college, I pulled all nighters a lot. That was because of procrastination. I was like a lot of young people who believed that I worked best at the last minute. Now I know that it’s really that I only managed my time well at the last minute, but that’s a lesson very few young people have learned, and I surely wasn’t the exception.
But the all nighter I feel the need to arrange now is out of a feeling of necessity – a belief that perhaps there is absolutely no other way to get everything done that needs to be done.
I have spent the last 13-14 hours car pooling, shopping, researching natural cleaning recipes, and cleaning my kitchen and bathroom. My kitchen and bathroom look wonderful. Magoo has her homework done. I picked TJ up from the train. All of our clothes are laundered. Our dishes are clean. The kids have been read to. I listened to their stories and we told jokes and we laughed a lot.
And this is what the dining room looks like. (Mind you, it was clean at this time last night.)
And I’m exhausted.
See, the more I clean one room, the messier the others get because then children are left free to destroy them. They clean up. They are doing well with their chores. But they are three and six and cleaning takes them time, and some nights we simply don’t have time to finish it all.
So I came to my conclusion…
All nighters.
I just need to forgo sleep. Then my house can be clean and my children can be happy and I can have that happy peaceful feeling I get once every millennium when I can sit down on my couch with a good book at the end of a long day and see just cleanliness everywhere I look.
So that’s it, my friends. Who wants to join me? We can prove all those scientists wrong when they say human beings need sleep. As Tigger would say, “peshaw.”
Oh dear…that last pic is what a few rooms of my house look like too! I’m disabled so have a different view of life now: sleep is the most important gift you can give to yourself, not a clean room. Without sleep, you and your family will be miserable when you don’t have enough gas left in your tank to do the basics. Do what you can during the day, and consider just letting the rest slide until you can get to it. Believe me, I’m pretty obsessed about a clean house too, but have been happier since putting basic needs like sleeping, eating, and showering first. Otherwise you end up with a clean house and a broken mama, and that’s no good at all.