Cleaning

When I was single, housecleaning was a reasonably rare activity. Unless people were coming over or I was out of dishes, there didn't seem to be much point. When I would finally get it all together and clean, it would stay that way for weeks ... or, well, days anyway.

Now, I'm married with an almost-three-year-old kid. Adam and I can spent hours cleaning and tidying the house, only for our daughter to start messing it up--before we've even finished cleaning. It's very demoralizing.

We had a date last night, our first real date in months and months. Our daughter's godmother graciously offered to babysit for us, so we needed to make an effort to tidy up the house. We'd been a bit lax about it the last several weeks; we'd all been battling illness and hadn't gotten back on track yet. But we put a few hours of work in and got things organized, swept, dusted, toys put away, and the bathroom clean. It felt really good to come home last night and have the living room look all tidy and inviting.

Within 20 minutes of waking up this morning, the wee one had already started leaving tracks of her progress around the house. There is currently a pair of discarded shorts in the corner, two books on the coffee table, her purse with its contents scattered on the easy chair, a toy ball resting on top of the TV stand, and the backing from a page of stickers crumpled on the floor. The stickers themselves are plastered to her bare tummy. She was dressed less than an hour ago.

Sigh.

I know this stage will pass. They even tell me it will be over all too quickly. But some days, I'm just discouraged that I'll ever have a clean house.