That's Life

Okay, so life caught me in a strangle hold for a couple of days and wouldn't let me get back to blogging. That's life.

Well, last night the kids (ahem, er, mom actually) finally got their bedrooms cleaned back up after, I don't know...4 months of chaos?! So, they decided to write a letter to the house fairy telling her they were sorry for not keeping their rooms clean, and asking her to please inspect them again. The house fairy, being kind and forgiving (not to mention beautiful, smart, an incredible cook...I digress), did come and inspect their rooms. She left them each a small sprinkling of soft, shimmery fairy-gold dust, some gifts, and a note. She is so much fun! (I wonder if she ever sleeps?)

That said, you'd be proud to know that I cleaned out around 3 leaf and lawn bags worth of stuff to give away, and a 13 gallon bag worth of stuff to go in the garbage...just from the kids' two bedrooms! This endeavor has taken me a long time to complete. For one thing, just finding time to get in there without the kids (who want, of course, to keep everything), while someone else is watching them (heh!), when we're not doing schoolwork, and I'm not supposed to be fixing dinner, and they're not in bed, and my sweet hubby is not clamoring for my attention...I think you get the point, right? For another thing, when it is time to dispose of the items that I've managed to wrangle away from the kids (even though they haven't cared for them for years), my sweet hubby has to go back through them and tell me that we should keep at least a third of them because...

So, when I thought that we were all finished and could tuck the little morsels into their beds, the Little Princess had a confession to make: all this time when we had thought that she was doing such a splendid job of always keeping her room clean, what she had really done was to shove things under her bed and dressers, or into her closet, or even right on her dresser, and strategically place other things nice and neatly in front of them, cleverly concealing them from our sight. So she and I spent an hour pulling out all her disguised clutter (including dishes, toys, trash, dirty clothes, books, movies, etc), and putting all the items where they actually belonged. Little Princess cried sleepy-little-daughter tears as she told me over and over how sorry she was that she had deceived me and how badly she had felt whenever I made over how well she had cleaned her room. All the while, I kept telling her that she was completely forgiven (after all, at least I wasn't tripping over toys and injuring myself in her room). Give me hidden clutter over death-traps any day!

While all this was going on, my sweet hubby was in our bedroom setting up a sound system that a friend of his had given us, and all the other little morsels had very carefully and thoughtfully torn the living room to bits, unfolded the clothes I had folded, and made a colossal mess of the dining room. And by the time I had finished the kids' rooms and tucked them all into bed, it was so late that hubby was complaining that I would "stay up all night cleaning." So I left the dishes, and went on to bed (if you know me at all, then you know that my least favorite sight in the morning is a sink full of dishes...which, in this case, amounted to about 5 dishes). No surprises, I'm sure, when I tell you that he had an ulterior motive for getting me to bed. And no, it's not what you think...he just wanted to show off his new toy. So we went to sleep to the sound of Mozart wafting softly our way from two gi-normous speakers and two equally imposing boxes on the wardrobe. These, by the way, have completely replaced all my pictures, mementos, and decorative touches, as well as my jewelry box (which is currently on the floor waiting for the semi-sweet children to hide or otherwise misplace its contents).

As a woman of simple pleasures, I was perfectly happy to listen to the local Christian music station on the tiny white radio/alarm clock that I've listend to since I was 11 (yep, it's really still there). As the wife of a man I adore, I'll have to content myself with the fact that having that thing in our bedroom really makes him feel happy (until the next thing comes along that he's just got to have in order to be really happy). ;) Men and their toys, huh.