Spring Cleaning
Ahhhh, Spring in the Rocky Mountains! We are spoiled with 50-60 degree days, days of rain, snow in the mountains, fresh air, grass greening up, trees budding, children playing outside, and warm, warm sunshine. Ahhhh, I look around and find that I need to get my inside feeling like the outside: fresh and clean!
To help in my motivation for spring cleaning, I was remembering the stories of my grandmother’s childhood. She said that she had a coal furnace when they were growing up in Smithfield and so in the spring they would have to take the pink goo paste and roll it down the wallpaper to clean off the black coal dust…ahh refreshing to feel all clean. I loved that story of going from dark and dusty to fresh and clean.
Fortunately we didn’t have to use the pink paste in our spring cleaning, but we did use a lot of elbow grease to clean the kitchen, hallways, doors, baseboards, blinds, laundry room, and garage. This is really stage one of the cleaning, but wow, does it feel great! Of course since I have an army of supporters, the kids were given an assignment, with choices, and wow…did it turn out great! Why—because they all had a goal, a starting point, and a finishing point.
Story about Garrett: he had the best attitude about all of it. If there is one thing about my Garrett is his pure energy and desire to help. He washed and wiped down all the shutters in the house—we have 18 windows with shutters, then vacuumed out each cupboard, vacuumed the stairs, and finally helped in folding the laundry. He was focused, and highly motivated. His motivation turned out to be something so simple, but so real. With each story I would tell I would use silly voices, happy faces and so forth. He would look at me and say, “wow, you are smiling; wow you are happy; wow you can be silly!” Hum, for me, lesson learned—smile more, laugh more, and just show love. (I now have another topic to blog about—more next week).
My point of this post is that during the clean we had some grumbling, and some sour faces as they would look at the pile of dishes, pots and pans, and laundry that seemed to get bigger and bigger during the clean—instead of smaller and smaller, however, the end results spoke for themselves.
Several of the kids at the end of “the clean” couldn’t keep from commenting, “wow! I can’t believe it looks like this!”Work is work and, no, it isn’t all that fun, but what makes the clean worth it is that as we clean we end up talking: talking about life, about the ups and downs of things, and about stories of long ago. That is worth it to me. I love to have those discussions….it is the everyday bonding moments that make the memories.Nothing big or profound, but just clean….