Well, today I earned major Mom Points on that Perfect Mommy Score I'm always working on. I did a full on clean of the house from top to bottom. (Before you get all impressed, it was way overdue. I am pretty sure there was stuff growing in the drain trap in my shower, and my fridge was an official biohazard site.)
I'm talking about the kind of cleaning that involves places like behind the toilet and q-tips on the sink faucet knobs. I impressed even myself. Six loads of laundry (which I actually folded and put away instead of leaving them in the baskets and making the family dig through them for school clothes), vacuumed entire house, mopped all of the floors, cleaned three bathrooms, cleaned three bedrooms, changed linens on five beds, cleaned under beds with the broom, emptied the trashcans, did two loads of dishes, cleaned the laundry room, and even made two loaves of banana bread with almost-funky bananas. (Wow, I'm impressing myself. No wonder I'm passing out tired.)
In exactly two-and-a-half minutes, my three-yr-old child who is still at home with me during the day, destroyed the bulk of that work. She 'disappeared' and when I realized that my 'helper' had vanished (silence with a toddler in the house is nothing but bad news), I found her in the bathroom painting her toes with purple Barbie nailpolish. No, that wasn't a figure of speech, she didn't just paint the nails, she painted her entire toes. When my shadow fell over her from the doorway, she held up the little brush and flashed a million-dollar smile up at me from those baby blues, truly excited about this amazing accomplishment, "Look at me, Mommy! I'm boo-ti-fool."
Lord, Help me. How do you get after that child?
And of course, this was on the CLEAN bathroom floor. She didn't even have the decency to do it before I mopped. Sheesh. While I was on my hands and knees cleaning that off of my (previously sparkling) bathroom floor, she found a bottle of hair detangler on the kitchen counter and sprayed the entire home office including, but not limited to, the computer, computer keyboard, printer, phone, floor, and let's not forget the chair.
When I rounded the corner with the rags from re-cleaning the bathroom floor to find my child naked save for the purple toes spraying the computer chair, she said, "Look! I clean it too, Mommy!" (Whispering to myself don't freak out, don't freak out, don't freak out.) And it's off to find towels and cleaner to get that mess up. (I'm sitting on a folded towel while typing this because the chair is still soaked.)
While I was cleaning up the office, this same child opened a ziplock bag containing a loaf of warm banana bread and helped herself to a fistful, carrying it clutched in her little hand, eating the parts that oozed out between her fingers, sprinkling it through the house as she toured the entire facility: kitchen, diningroom, hallway, and into her brother's bedroom, where she ground the remaining crumbs into his carpet. I discovered the naked purple detangler baby as I was taking the towels from the spray incident into the laundry room to put in the washer. And banana bread is sticky. So it left a trail that had to be re-mopped.
I actually had to step outside and take a few deep breaths and let the twitching in my eye stop before going into start re-cleaning my floors through the length of the entire house. (And it's not like cleaning my floors is a daily event--I am thankful when I hit them once a week, so twice in one day is like an epic occurance.) The fact that I didn't a) put her on ebay for sale, b) burst into tears, or c) go nuclear is a complete miracle.
Oh, yeah. I am totally scoring that trophy this year. High five.
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