Crumbs on kitchen countertops, pee on toilet seats, tiny hand or fingerprints on walls, food on kitchen floor, dust everywhere, clothes thrown from here to there, diapers everywhere, and the endless supply of dirty hands with happy dirty faces ready to grab and greet you after every fine meal. In the revolutionary cleaning war, the only thing more accurate than incoming enemy fire is incoming friendly fire. When you have little babies or toddlers, this is especially true. Trying to evade the direct stream of pee flying at your face from your baby boy at about eighty miles per hour is like running out of your foxhole in a combat zone yelling, “Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhh!”
The direct hit of pee on your face only confirms the fact that war is indeed rottener than politics. The only sadder part is that your baby boy is smiling and laughing back at you as you clean your face off. Yes, I took the direct hit from Tyler when he was an infant and remember it vividly. It wasn’t the first time that it’s happened to me. CJ did it too when he was an infant as I was bathing him in his infant bathing tub. Madison used to throw food on the floor from her high chair for the dogs that we used to have, but when the dogs left the house for good, I became her next victim. She decided to start throwing food at me as if I was starving and needed to eat. In addition, she would leave food trails on the floor forgetting that the dogs were no longer with us.
Now that they’re 2, 3, and 6 years old respectively, I don’t have to worry about direct fire coming at me with extraneous waste or food, thank God! However, the cleaning battles still exist. Tyler is in the process of potty training and doing pretty well with it so far. He is going to the potty all by himself and he’s got the peeing in the potty part down like an officer in the field. We are working on the pooping part and that is proving to be a challenge for him. All the praise and candy offerings don’t seem to be working at this point in time.
Recently, as I was preparing dinner one night, I heard this little grunt and squirm come from little Tyler. I scrambled to get him as I dropped my cooking utensils and picked him up as if I was carrying a wounded soldier and ran to the bathroom as “bombs away” thoughts were running through my mind. I was just hoping that his turds would land in the toilet instead of his wolverine underwear. As in the old saying, I was a day late and a dollar short. All of it came out in his underwear and the cleaning began. We strive to conquer the pooping part in due time.
Cleaning over and over and over again is what you do when you’re a parent. The amount of cleaning escalates when all your kids bring their friends to your house. How many times have you toiled to clean your carpets and hardwood floors by vacuuming, sweeping, dusting, and mopping…only to have it ruined minutes later by a herd of excitable children? The thundering stampede come running in with their shoes covered in mud leaving the clean floors dirty again when you weren’t looking. Thus, the cleaning starts all over again and the traditional working husband wonders why he finds his stay at home wife and mother wallowing in a fetal position sitting in the corner of their kitchen floor when he gets home from work. The look of insanity on her face and one mud foot track away from explosion.
This is why I believe Bill Cosby once said, “I am not the boss of my house. I don't know when I lost it. I don't know if I ever had it. But I have seen the boss's job and I do not want it.”
Another parent once told me that cleaning your house while your kids are still growing is much like shoveling the drive before it has stopped snowing. My advice is keep on keepin’ on and to all you working dad’s out there, just do your best to help your stay at home wife and mother as much as you can because they have the hardest job. Take it from me, a single dad who knows the ropes and is still learning how to climb. Although the war may be at its peak when you have little ones destroying your house day in and day out, every parent knows that the revolutionary cleaning war never ends.
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