The Little Gnome in our House
In my house, I am certain that there is a little gnome who lives under the stairs…and when no one is looking he runs through the house throwing, tossing and disheveling all that he encounters…He opens the cabinets and leaves them open, he takes trash and places it all around the house in inconspicuous places, he fills my sink with dirty dishes that I have no memory whatsoever of using, he leaves half full sippy cups and random articles of clothing laying around the stairs and the floor …and to top it off…he even plucks my dog’s hair and leaves little clumps of it everywhere! And, he does all this in what seems like only minutes since I last picked up the house!!! How does he do that?
Well the only way I can continue to keep this little gnome from entirely disrupting my house beyond repair is to stay one step behind him! I can’t let him get too far ahead of me or I am sure my house will actually cave in upon itself! So how do I do that…easy…two scheduled “clean sweeps” every day…one in the morning and one in the evening…
In an earlier post I talked about a morning and evening routine! These are very important for several reasons, but my favorite part of these routines is that they help me schedule in some time to pick up my house. I am NOT talking about cleaning…just straightening up…It is amazing how I can go to bed on a Saturday night with the house straight and return from church the very next day to a house that looks like a tornado flipped it high in the air shaking up everything inside...or maybe the gnome comes out while we are all at church…either way…I have to devote two times a day for about 5 – 10 minutes to literally walk the house from one end to the other straightening up the place…I call these my “clean sweeps.”
Here, I will tell you exactly what I did just now in my “evening clean sweep”…I put the dirty dishes in the dishwasher, I put the kids clothes on the stairs for them to take up and put away or in the laundry bins, I put the pillows and throw blanket back in the right place on the couch, I threw away the trash from our “to go” lunch, I put all the dog toys back in the “dog toy basket,” I flushed a few toilets, closed a few cabinets, and threw away Saturday’s newspaper …wheeweee…and all of that took about 7 minutes, but the place feels 7 million times cleaner!
I do this little “clean sweep” two times a day, once in the morning and once in the evening…if I did not, then after a couple of days I would have much more than 7 minutes of work on my hands and a house full of clutter and chaos. Also…don’t go it alone…Just yell out to all parties in your household… “CLEAN SWEEP TIME” and watch your house begin to take shape…have your children clean sweep their rooms daily too, and see the difference it makes in keeping a neater room.
Maybe someday I will catch that gnome right in the act…plucking clumps of little Sparky’s fur and depositing it on my favorite throw blanket, but until then I am just going to do my best to keep one step behind him everyday …and you know… I think I am gaining on him!
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