Dusting Off Some "Me Time"

The weekend here was positively glorious. Sunny, with a gentle warm breeze, sapphire blue skies dotted with whipped cream clouds, and my favorite temperature. 82 degrees. Surely you're not surprised that I have a favorite temperature?

Mac Daddy took the boys to the park to play some baseball Saturday morning. They gathered their gear, a cooler of snacks (that I admit to checking on the sly to ensure Mac Daddy packed the right stuff), and sunblock, thanks to my nagging (no word on if that was actually applied). Hugs and kisses, smooch smooch goodbye. Off they went, downright dancing down the sidewalk. My three boys, to whom I owe all this dirt and noise.

And then I clutched the powder room pedestal sink to keep from falling to my knees onto the cheap plastic stool and wept. Fat monsoon tears that I didn't even bother to wipe away. I gripped the sink to keep myself from giving in to whim and bashing the weathered pewter mirror in front of me. I stifled the bellowing scream bubbling up in my gut and let a snarl escape instead, a rather unfulfilling impostor.

No park for me. No breeze was to grace my face. I stayed behind at home.

Ah, the house to myself. Just me. Unplugged and Twitter free. Illicit, decidedly un-kid-friendly lyrics cranking at rock star decibels on the iPod, hot, strong coffee in my favorite travel mug and another full pot in the French press.

And me, hair swept back in a blue bandanna fished out of the dress up box, tattered purple tank tank top, supremely comfortable baggy jersey knit shorts, not a lick of mascara. Just me.

And a dustpan.
Broom.
Mop.
Murphy's oil.
Vacuum.
Sponges.
Rags.
Toilet bowl brush.
Stainless steel polish.
Method cleaner.
Dustbuster.
And those damned yellow rubber gloves.

You see, the only "me time" I get in my house is when I'm cleaning. Forget what I said before, now I regret firing my cleaning lady. First of all, cleaning my house makes me utterly irascible, while having a clean house makes me deliriously jubilant. The stream of pee around the bathrooms, thanks to two little boys and one big man, with poor aim, is enough to make me gag. You should hear me yell when I catch Bird leaning back to pee so he can (somewhat) aim and watch Kim Possible at the same time. He misses. Every. Single. Time.

And then there's all the dust bunnies.
Hair.
Fuzz.
Crunched leaves, twigs, and other signs of nature.
Sticky floors.
Crumbs.
Dust.
Fingerprints.
Hand prints in the least expected spots.
Toothpaste goop.
And all the usual suspects.

I. HATE. To. Clean.

The proverbial silver lining is this: I am all by myself when I am cleaning. That alone makes it more bearable.

No one is there to tug on me. I can pee in peace, whether the door is shut or not (and for the record, I have no issues with aim). I can eat three popsicles in one sitting, one in every flavor. I don't mentally tally up the constant chorus of "Hey, Mommy" in my exploding head. I don't have to endure knock-knock jokes or the Dragon Tales theme song. I don't have lunches to prepare or LEGO fights to mediate or bottoms to wipe or time outs to impose. There is no whining, bickering, yelling. The banshees have left the building.

And I am alone.

Me time.

Problem is, me time is not the same as time for me.

I suddenly don't feel so guilty about ignoring my family all day Monday while I curled up in the rocking chair on the front porch, with the ceiling fans on so I too could feel a breeze in my hair, to indulge in Twilight.

Sometimes I miss my little one bedroom apartment on Excelsior Boulevard. The one where I had a God awful floral wallpaper border in my nauseously girly bedroom, battenburg lace curtains, umpteem throw pillows on my bed, two walk-in closets, a tiny balcony covered in AstroTurf, a wall of mirrors in the bathroom, my very own stereo, even though it was just a little Bose shelf unit, and wall-to-wall carpeting. The same apartment where my Sunday paper was stolen on a regular basis. The same apartment that smelled ever so faintly of a potion of cat piss, stale Swisher Sweets, and bleach. The same apartment where doing laundry in the basement required a chaperon. The same apartment where I was alone but never lonely. Alone. By myself. Doing whatever the hell I wanted.

When time was all about me.

Wordless Wednesday: Mess Amassed

Children = Entropy

This is why I don't have more than 2 kids. This is how my living room looked after 2 five year olds and 2 three year olds took over and held me hostage in the bathroom. They could have at least banished me to the kitchen where there was wine.

My friend Caroline posted on Facebook about how her kids schemed every night about ways to wreck her clean house. A commenter left a remark that children equal entropy. I failed physics and pretty much every science class I ever took (I am really the only Indian in the whole world who is bad at math and science.) so I looked up the definition. Entropy: a measure of the disorder of a system. Systems tend to go from a state of order (low entropy) to a state of maximum disorder (high entropy). Mac Daddy and I = low entropy. Add children to the equation, FOUR of them, and you clearly have high entropy. They can't help it; it's a physical law just like gravity.

Oh hell, let's be honest, it doesn't take four kids to wreak such havoc. One can do that in a matter of seconds with the right super hero powers at play.

Just plain water for me, thanks.

I dragged my sorry self to the gym this morning for a quick, and I mean quick, workout. 45 minutes is better than 2 tuxedo cupcakes with extra chocolate chips and a side of Regis and Kelly. I was stuffing my overloaded, poor quality freebie gym bag into the locker and knocked all my essentials off the bench, towards the floor. The gym locker room floor. The same locker room of toothbrush fame.

Being the crazy OCD woman I am, I leaped across the bench, coming just this close to knocking into the taut mama next me, trying to retrieve my precious essentials before they made contact with the floor. That floor. And if you must know, my essentials include an MP3 player, little towel, water bottle, and Chapstick. Is this news to you that I am addicted to lip balm? Because I am. It's stashed all over the place lest I go without. Shudder at the thought.

So now all the gym ladies are looking at me like I am auditioning for the part of crazy lady #1 in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest Redux. They are thinking that things falling onto a floor are perfectly fine, perhaps just a skip away from dandy in fact. All on eyes on me to see what the heck is so precious. The way I see it, all things that come into contact with my person are precious.

I knew better.

Lady Luck was scattering her dust elsewhere this morning. All my stuff rolled onto the floor. Now I know how the kid with the damn meatball must have felt. In the midst of my panting from sheer heroic efforts and total whacked out stress, I retrieved my stuff. The essentials. I wiped everything down with a wipe (baby wipes are a misnomer...the marketing opportunities are endless if Kimberly-Clark would just do away with the baby image on the packaging!). Yes, I keep a package of wipes in my gym bag (and my purse, tote bag, and glove compartment...oh, and the emergency bag in my trunk). Not green, I know. Someone give me a better alternative.

I digress, as I am known to do on occasion. Forgive me. Dirt really stresses me out.

Everything was fine. The essentials were no worse for the wear.

Except my water bottle. The essentialist of the essentials.

I picked it up and dropped it again as if it were coated in Dick Cheney's piss.

Only this was worse.

There was a solitary pube stuck to the little spout. You know, where my MOUTH would go! And yeah, it wasn't mine (not like that would have made a difference).

Now excuse me while I go dry heave in the corner.

The moral of the story is: when the given the choice between tuxedo cupcakes and exercise, choose the cupcakes.

Dishin' the dirt.

Though I am a confirmed neat freak, my house is currently dirty. Really dirty. As in, call in Kim and Aggie. I'm ashamed of its condition, so don't be offended if I haven't invited you over for a while. It's not messy, cluttered, or in disarray. Of course the house is still orderly. A Virgo can only let things go so far. You wouldn't even notice the dirt until you pulled up a seat and realized you were stuck to it. I have a hunch that some AWOL Peeps are hiding amidst the cushions.

But trust me, my house is dirty. The Ty-D-Bol Man needs to unpack his bags and stay a while. The dust bunnies are, well, doing what real live bunnies do. All over the place. I'm thinking about collecting them to knit Christmas stockings for the whole family. There is a crunchiness underfoot upon entrance from any of the three doors into my home. Who am I kidding? The crunchiness underfoot is everywhere. You'd be hard pressed to find a speck of floor not covered in dried mud, crunched up leaves, grains of rice, crumbles of scone, or strands of hair (mine and the cat's). Pebbles of Tidy Cat leave the hallway far from tidy. Deal has been potty training, so the random sprays of pee have quadrupled. That's not even counting the poop he left on the toilet seat this morning. How the hell does that happen?!

I'm not even including the oh, 30 or so flies (the fat, lazy Tom Arnolds of the insect world), that Mac Daddy killed in Bird's room today. I guess the dead squirrel stuck between the walls is finally decaying. BLECH. ICK. YUCK. GAG. The mere thought of it makes me want to pull back my hair and let my dinner fly. Except the toilet is too gross to even toy with the idea of getting anything but my ass close to it.

And the dust. The damn dust. It's pollen season here so there's a green film coating every surface in the area code. The simple act of opening the screen door to let some fresh air in leaves a green powder all over the hardwood floors. The house doesn't stink like boys yet, but it's close. No amount of orange spray will mask the sty that my family is living in right now.

I suppose my family is taking this blog's name to heart. At least there are only two more days until the cleaning people come. No use tackling it now, right? I mean, what's the use? I'm sure those two days will fly right by.

Floored

When my boys grow up and lounge in a therapist's leather chaise one day, they might be saying, "My mother was a neat freak. The queen of neatniks everywhere. All those anal rules about folding towels and fitted sheets drove our dad to the edge of madness, but he stayed because Mom was the trophy wife he married on the first try." OK, so maybe I embellished that trophy wife part a teensy bit. We all know every psychosis known to man is blamed on his mother anyway, so this small deal I make about cleanliness will be the least of their worries. My boys are perhaps the only children on the planet who ask permission before dumping out a crate (a labeled crate, mind you) of toys. Overheard just this morning as I was cleaning up after breakfast (because I never, ever leave crumbs on the table or dishes in the sink):

Deal to Bird: "Can I dump out the cars?"
Bird: "Yes, but only if you clean up the balls first."

Music to my ears! Some might say I am squashing their creativity, but there was a day last week that I tolerated the Legos, Lincoln Logs, Kapla blocks, AND random assortment of weathered blocks and spools from Mac Daddy's childhood strewn on the floor at the same time. At the same time. Did you catch that? At the same time. I've even submitted to MIXING Playdoh colors. Deal loves the kaleidescope of colors he can create, but Bird cringes like I do at the concoction. If I squint, the mixed Playdoh looks a bit like a Pucci print so I can appreciate it if I kick in my fashion sensibilities. And admittedly, there is some crazy satisfaction in mashing together the purple and green, but I've learned firsthand that too much mushing makes the whole blob puce.

Teaching my boys about cleanliness and the the simple act of putting toys, shoes, coats, and backpacks away is part of my job. It is my responsibility to teach them how to be good citzens, stewards of our planet, and gentlemen. Some woman will thank me one day. It is common for Bird to exclaim out of the blue, "I love it when our house is clean!" He won't even ride in a friend's car because he thinks it's too dirty. And believe, he's said so aloud...to her. I'll be covering the chapter on Tact and Decorum at a later date.

Hopefully a woman like the one I saw in the locker room at the gym this morning won't be lurking around my boys. After a long workout on the ellipitcal thingee I went to take a shower, wearing my flip flops, natch. As I walked into the shower I noticed a pile of stuff on the shower floor next to me. Here's an inventory of what I saw ON THE SHOWER FLOOR, with no cover, container, or makeshift protection from the gazillion bacteria and viruses lurking on that one 6 x 6 inch square of tile: a disposable razor, a bar of soap, one of those netted puffy scrubbers, a tube of Crest that someone squeezed in the middle (a deal breaker for me), and get this, a TOOTHBRUSH! Did I mention is was ON THE SHOWER FLOOR?

The same floor littered with pubic hair before it swirls down the drain. The same floor that tinea pedis grows rampantly on. The same floor that people pee on to get a two-fer in the shower in the drought-stricken ages we are living in. Trust me, I know this happens. If nothing else, I do know that Deal once peed in the shower by accident after we were rinsing off after a swim.

I'm curious what was going through that woman's mind as she set her toothbrush on the shower floor. Can you imagine? I heard that staph germs can spew 25 feet after you flush the toilet so you shouldn't keep toothbrushes exposed anywhere near the toilet. I'm pretty sure the same folks would tell us that putting your TOOTHBRUSH on the SHOWER FLOOR is even more DISGUSTING. For the record, all the toothbrushes in our house are well protected from staph germs. Bird goes so far as covering his with a Spiderman travel top just because he's super clean, or some might say fussy, like I am. For starters, those pesky staph germs are kept at bay if you just shut the toilet seat before flushing. Now some woman will really thank me for that one day.