Monday.

I really hope no one smells my armpits this morning because I ran out of deodorant.  Oh, don’t worry, I didn’t go without, I’m not that insane, I just borrowed Dave’s and I smell like a man.  My eighty-eight year old Meme totally hates the word ‘pits’ she thinks it is totally vulgar for some reason.  Anytime I think about my pits, I think of her. 

Thankfully, she doesn’t know how to use the internet or she’d call me this morning and say, “Oh, Shel, I can’t believe you said pits on the internet.”

She’d probably feel that way about a lot of what I post here, I’m guessing.  Hey, guess what?  Now I’m going to appall my mother too!

In case you’re new here, I’m a terrible housekeeper.  Terrible.  My mother finds this to be a fate worse than death that her daughter isn’t a neat freak.  Her nickname when we were growing up was Joan.  As in Crawford.  No she didn’t beat us with wire hangers, she just liked to wake us up at 7 am on a Saturday morning blasting the Ohio State fight song, to clean the house.  Our friends NEVER spent the night on Friday because she’d blast them out of bed too.  Then she’d make Lyndsey march around and dot the i. 

Are you getting a picture of why I am so weird?

She comes over to my house to babysit and folds my laundry while she’s here.   I can not be the only person in the world with perpetual baskets of clean laundry sitting around waiting to be folded.  Oh, but not for Janet, she pulls everything out of the dryer, folds it, and puts it away before the warning bell even dings on her fancy front loader. 

Don’t misunderstand, we are not straight Hoarder’s level by any means, but there is always chaos.  Always.  We clean the kitchen, we cook a meal for eight and use every pan in the house.  We clean the kids’ room, well… you can see where this is going, can’t you? 

I clean the same stack of toys 10 times a day, but it always always looks like a tornado has hit the living room.  When Tate is not into her toys, she’s pulling stacks of books out and not reading them.  Oh no, we only read Cinder the Bubble Blowing Dragon {close to probably ten times a day} but she likes to pull out all of the other books and taunt me with them anyway. 

Look at that book you haven’t read a million times Mom… doesn’t that story look intriguing?  Oh yeah, well, here is Cinder… again this time do it with your eyes closed, from memory.

So I’m not really a spring cleaner, per se but in the fall, there’s something about the prospect of cold weather and being stuck in the house.  It makes me want to clear out and go through stuff.  I have stacks of baby clothes to send to my cousin.  Another pile of stuff for the boys.  Last night I cleaned off our dumping ground desk.  Last week I cleaned the kids’ room.  It’s like winter is coming, everything must be organized right now.  Right now!

Or maybe it’s just a Pavlovian response to hearing the Ohio State fight song.