Cleaning For Company

Noah’s first birthday is just around the corner and because of this we have both sets of grandparents coming to visit.  Having our parents stay with us means one very important thing.  We need to get off our duffs and clean the two spare rooms downstairs.   Adding to the urgency is that Erin only has four days off between her last eleven-day run at work and her next ten-day run.

The easiest of the rooms to clean will be the guest room.  There are mostly large objects in this room, baby swings and seats and the like, all which are now too small for Noah.  At one point all of these things were stacked neatly in the corner, but for one reason or another they have now taken over the room along with a half-erected playpen. We are very much out-of-sight-out-of-mind type of people and having a child has only made that worse.  Once the pile started to move out of the corner and make itself more comfortable on the bed, I began tossing other things in there and shutting the door.    My parents come in two weeks so sooner or later I am going to have to venture in among the tethering piles of baby stuff and herd them neatly back into the corner.  Despite the fact that we have moved the wine cabinet into the room ( to child proof the family room) and there is a dresser to put their clothes in, my parents are not going to be pleased if they have to sleep on the floor, curled up in a ball due to lack of a space.    The other room which we call our office is in much worse shape than the bedroom.  Along with the out-of-sight out-of-mind mentality we are also pilers, which means we have piles of papers, clothes, and whatever else we do not want to deal with at the moment taking up space in the office. I even have an article about pilers and fillers that I cut out of the newspaper and put into a pile.   Not only is there no wine cabinet or dresser in this room; at this point there is not even a bed, a rather important item if that is where your in-laws are planning on sleeping.

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Erin has gone back to work and other than moving around the piles in the office and making it look neater nothing has gotten done. Noah has been sick and Erin has not felt well. I have just not felt like cleaning.  Now the cleaning will have to be done in mad sprints while Noah is occupied or sequestered to his crib. My parents arrive in just over a week and I am sure that mad cleaning sprint will happen the night before they arrive once Noah has gone to bed.