A Cleaning Conundrum

According to www.dictionary.com, the definition of the word "conundrum" is:

"anything that puzzles"

There is no other word out there that better applies to my past weekend than the word conundrum. I spent a full day and a half cleaning, polishing, scrubbing, disinfecting, folding, sorting, organizing, and labelling. In my ignorant Friday-night mental fog, I thought to myself "Angela, just think of how clean the house will look Sunday night when you all go to bed!". So how is it possible that last night, as I turned off the lights and looked around the kitchen and living room, that it honestly looked no different than it had on Friday? I mean, come on!

Is there anyone else out there that feels the same way as I do, or is this solely a phenomenon that hovers over me as I move from house-to-house? What I need are some man-chores, like putting the patio furniture in the shed. There are obvious results there:

4:26pm: Patio furniture on the deck.
4:28pm: No patio furniture on the deck.

Rather than:

4:26pm: Dirty toilet in guest bathroom.
4:28pm: Toilet in guest bathroom. Is it dirty? Hmmmm...it's hard to tell from here....I mean, it looks clean....I can't really be sure.

The type of cleaning that we do, the polishing, the ironing (Okay, that one I don't really do), the laundry, the floor washing, the oven cleaning, the dusting, the counter-wiping, it just does not get noticed by anyone other than us. And after you spend the two-hour-afternoon-nap-time window doing all of this, it takes less than three minutes for an experienced and evil toddler to undo most of it. Toys get removed from bins, juice leaves a sticky stain on your carpet, and toast crumbs leave an incriminating trail wherever they go. And don't even get me started on how quickly a man can re-soil a clean toilet.

I will take two things away from this past weekend:

1. I completely understand why people hire cleaners.
2. If you have children, or a furry pet (Sony!), you might as well just give up, and never invite anyone over to your house. You should be good until your kids hit junior high, at which point they will undoubtedly visit a friend whose house does not look like it should be nominated for the TV show "Hoarders".