Oh wait, that’s “Resistance is futile.” Well, if they had small children and didn’t live in a cube, no doubt they would agree that mopping is also futile.

My out-of-town cousin and his family (three kids) came over on Saturday for the day, and my parents and my brother & family (one kid) came over to visit with them too (we had a great time). This made seventeen people, eight adults and nine kids. We cleaned up the house tolerably well, but I sort of petered out when it came to mopping my kitchen/dining room floor and just swept it instead.

This happens a lot when I’m pregnant. Mopping sort of drops to the very last thing on the list, you know, like the thing I do if every other thing in the entire house is cleaned, organized, folded, put away, I’ve eaten, the kids are all in bed, and I still have enough energy left to do it….

It occurred to me that mopping right before seventeen people were here could potentially be a stupid idea anyway. I didn’t do it. Then we were planning a family New Year’s Eve party of Monday night (25 people), so I again contemplated moppage but again rejected the idea. After the spill list for the weekend, I was pretty happy that I hadn’t bothered.

Spill #1 ~ Saturday afternoon Georgie drops his cup of orange juice on the kitchen floor.

Spill #2 ~ Saturday afternoon my cousin knocks his cup of coffee on the floor but cleverly manages to miss spilling any on his wife’s white sweater.

Spill #3 ~ Sunday afternoon Faith dumps her cup of milk all over the table and kitchen floor (actually, I think this was Kyra’s milk that she had declined to finish and hadn’t bothered to put on the counter).

Spill #4 ~  Monday morning, Kyra tips her cup of orange juice over onto her chair and the floor. I hadn’t even made it back to the kitchen to wring out the rag when….

Spill #5 ~ Anika dumps her orange juice on Kyra and the floor. Kyra was a bit distraught at this point.

Spill #6 ~ Anika decided that she wanted some leftover mac & cheese for dinner, so she put it in a bowl and microwaved it. Instead of removing her bowl from the microwave to the table, she took it out and dropped it so the macaroni got thrown all over the kitchen (the bowl wasn’t hot).

And the moral of the story is….. if you want clean floors, don’t have small children (or cousins). I figure that after all that, at least half of my kitchen is now clean. Four spills under the kitchen table and two on the kitchen floor got cleaned up, so that’s a good chunk of floor that got wiped down. That counts, right? RIGHT? Okay then. Of course, now that the last of our scheduled company is done, they’ve quit spilling everything in sight.

See, there’s two theories on mopping: One, you could mop before company comes and dazzle them with your shiny, sparkling floor for the five minutes before everyone dumps their drinks and crumbs on it; or two, you could mop after company comes so that you can enjoy your sparkling, shiny floor for the five minutes before your own family dumps their crumbs and drinks on it. That’s it. Those are the only two choices when you have five children under age ten. Well, that’s not true. You could just do neither of those and procrastinate mopping as long as humanly possible and just not mop until you can’t stand it any more. Hmmm, tough decision….

Rachel

Written by Rachel Shubin ~ Fiendish friend for effusive fun!