Cleaning Bells, Cleaning Bells, Cleaning all the way!

Haha.. if only things were that 'jolly'. Today I need to clean my house. Funny how cleaning comes AFTER everyone has come over for the week. It's been hard to catch up after our blast of a weekend.

I can say that when I was growing up I used to think how *easy* it would be to have my own house and to keep it clean. I continued to feel this way until I had kids. Being married and no children wasn't so bad, things seemed to be pretty easy and generally 2 adults can keep things sort of clean. But not when kids arrive. Somehow everything they 'bring' into the house it seems to make things so much more messy!

I used to think when K came along that I could just assign jobs to each day. This worked for about a week or two until I had a long weekend then things would be thrown out of wack and no matter how hard I couldn't get it back.

Then when Q came along and we moved into our first house in Toronto I used to think it was going to be so easy, we could unpack, clean up and everything. Little did I realize that unpacking would take almost a year and cleaning up at that house was never easy.

At one point I did even try the 'clean for 15 minutes, timer dings, get 5 minutes to do whatever, clean for 15 minutes, timer dings, get 5 minutes to do whatever.... ect' but that didn't work so well. I would forget to redo the timer for 5 minutes and then my schedule went out the window!

Now living here, just steps from Kyler school and with that 2 hour block while he is gone, it is still not easy. Generally my 'planned' cleaning time goes something like this:

Q and I get home from dropping off Kyler, I check my e'mail and Q gets his coat and boots off.
I get Q something to eat because he is hungry - even after just eating breakfast - and we play with some toys
I attempt to figure out what's for lunch and supper. This involves a trip out to the garage to get meat or whatever the meal is and then making sure we have everything else.
By then we have an accident or a poop on the potty which takes another 5 to 10 minutes since Q loves to have books read to him, or at least face to face conversations while he is there (I truly hope he grows out of this one)
Then it's back to making sure Q is dressed and ready to pick up Kyler!

So much for cleaning!

Now yesterday I did manage to get 1 bathroom cleaned and today I'm slowly working through the mess of things in the living room and dinning room. I'm also going to try and get to the boys bedroom but I'm not 100% sure how well that might work out. It may include (more so than may) alot of laundry since I'm not sure what was just taken out of the drawers and thrown on the floor and what they have worn lately. I really hope to have more of that organized soon. Then it's onto the play room to get it ready for my brothers visit this weekend. And if everything goes according to plan I hope to have a few minutes to finish doing some clean up in the kitchen and maybe even get back out to the garage to move the garbage bins and compost bin to the front yard.

I have high plans!

But the one thing that does make it easier is the Christmas music in the background!