Because most philosophies that frown on reproduction don't survive.

Wednesday, June 17, 2009

Reality Check

I'm tired of seeing pix of people's pristine houses, so here's a reality check: my kitchen after my three-year-old threw a tantrum this morning (what instigated it is still a mystery).

Note the cheerios all over the floor.

Some days you're the dinosaur; others, you're the pirate.

10 comments:

Anonymous said...

Which is worse: bachelor housekeeping, or keeping-up-with-the-kids housekeeping? Discuss.

Joel

Pro Ecclesia said...

Looks like our house. Actually, ours is worse from the perspective of having stuff all over the place.

Darwin said...

Which is worse: bachelor housekeeping, or keeping-up-with-the-kids housekeeping?

Different kinds of bad. As a bachelor, I never threw food on the floor, or randomly scattered shredded paper, and such. However, since I was moderately neat to start with, my motivation to ever sweep or dust was low. So things tended to get dusty and cluttered.

With kids, you end up sweeping 1-2 times a day, and yet the floor still looks like this much of the time.

Melanie Bettinelli said...

Mrs D,

Thanks for keeping it real!

I was just remarking the other day that before having toddlers I used to marvel at the idea of sweeping every day. I thought women who did that were somehow super tidy housekeepers who perhaps overdid it. Now I understand. If I don't sweep the dining room at least once a day I find I'm wading through Cheerios and squashed grapes and birdseed (we have a feeder on the back door and the sparrows toss the seeds on the steps and the baby brings it inside) and who knows what else. The floor still doesn't look clean most of the time, my standards haven't really risen, I just find that maintaining the same low standards of clean enough takes much more effort.

Dorian Speed said...

I. love. this.

I want the dinosaur/pirate on a t-shirt.

Also, your floor still looks shiny underneath all the Cheerios. I call foul. I would bring the filth via photo of my own world, but the memory card is now kaput. I think that happened the thirty-fourth time the baby pulled the card reader off my desk.

mrsdarwin said...

Dorian, the awesome part is that the dino/pirate is unstaged. I walked into the playroom to change the baby and was confronted with this display of savagery, which some young lady had set up and then abandoned.

Geoff Busbridge said...

That looks like my floor. Maybe cleaner. There aren't any Legos on the floor, or very large dust bunnies.

I sweep every blasted day. I do. But my 1 1/2 year old is trying to get a Cheerio plantation going...

Donald R. McClarey said...

That looks very clean by my memories of our house when we had toddlers and infants prowling about. Not that our teenagers now are necessarily neat, but they are messy in different ways.

CMinor said...

I think I've seen things on the order of the dino-pirate around my house, but my husband seems to have been responsible for those at least as often as my sons.

Pauli said...

I have 4 boys, oldest is 7. That kitchen is really not that bad in comparison to our first floor, however I love the dinosaur and pirate motif.