Of Angela's Law

I'm writing early because I'm expecting my college roommate to arrive this evening for a day-and-a-half o' fun!  (Although in reality I've grown quite boring in my old age and I'm not so sure how we'll entertain ourselves, but I'm pretty sure I know a couple of little kids who may require attention, so we'll see how far they go in the entertainment category.)

I have, of course, been cleaning my home to prepare for this wonderful guest.  Yet, I find myself questioning why we all feel the need to do a deep clean before guests arrive, as if we're all trying so hard to not let anyone else know how we actually live because we assume everyone else does it better, and yet the only reason we assume such is because everyone else cleans before we visit - oh the vicious cycle our culture has created.  Thus, I've decided, while not necessarily shattering the cycle, I'm not kicking my tail to have this home spotless.

Because I live here.

And I have two children and a husband who also live here.

There has to be a natural train of thought that leads one to presume that messes are made and, yes, we deal with them, but I'd rather not pretend we live in a museum.  It's our home.  If you visit, you're family and you'll live.

On a tangential line of thinking . . . another idea occurred to me while sweeping - a perfect time for thinking, I'd say.  I now hold the firm belief that the amount of time allotted for cleaning decreases in direct proportion to the amount of people who live in the home creating messes which need cleaning.  We'll call this Angela's Law.  I would have made a line graph depicting the law further for those visual learners out there, but if I had the time to make superfluous line graphs, I'd have the time to clean my home.

Here is an example of said law at work:

While pregnant with my first child, I made it a habit to sweep and mop my floors weekly.  I loved the look of pristine hardwood-imposter laminate flooring.  It made me feel so domestic.  It helped that the floor rarely ever looked that bad in the first place.  Two inactive adults tend not to create much dirt.

That habit was dropped shortly after I began spending my time chasing a crawler around said now-non-pristine non-wood floors.  However, I had lately begun to pick up with the routine again and I've found that by the time my next-scheduled time arrives in which I pull out my broom and dustpan, my floors, particularly the area under our dining room table, look like an angry monkey found our cereal boxes.  If I haven't mopped in a week (or longer), my fake-wood floors are speckled with white drops of dried milk which have leaked from one of the twelve sippie-cups peppering our entertainment center, ottoman and side table.  This is ridiculous!  And if I wanted my floors to NOT look that way, I'd pretty much have to care for them daily and, let's be honest, the once-a-week thing isn't even happening as regularly as the name implies because I tend to be a bit busy with the other aspects of life - like feeding and entertaining my children.

And this ironic cycle of children creating debris while simultaneously sucking the time out of the day which would otherwise be used for counteracting their disarray is Angela's Law at work.