If you Give a Mom a Chore...

I woke up this morning loath to start the list of "to do's" that I had to prepare for Thanksgiving and guests (yay!).  I wanted, rather, to read a book.  (Yes, it is another P and P spin off that I found.  I know what you are thinking.  "How does she keep finding those?" The answer is, I don't know.)  So, I decided that at least I could get my sheets in the washer.  Then I could say I was doing laundry AND reading.  That's being doubly efficient.  So I went upstairs to strip my bed.  Unfortunately (or fortunately) I looked around my room and thought about how tired I was of seeing toys (toys!) in my bedroom.  It is supposed to be my sanctuary.  So then I decided that while the sheets were washing, I could at least clean my room.  It was on the list anyway.  So I started to clean my room.  After finishing most of it, I went into my closet to put something away and saw my vanity counter.  I thought, "I am tired of having to dig through everything on here for my eyeliner, etc." So I decided, since my bedroom hadn't really taken that long, I might as well do a thorough job and clean my closet too.  Well, as you can imagine, one thing led to another and I deep cleaned the entire room, including accumulating two bags of junk from my closet I didn't want anymore.  I also rearranged a bit of furniture.  Now my room looks bigger with the arrangement (and dare I say more feng shui?). 

In the process of putting things away when I finished the room, I found that the hallway had a few toys in it too. Well, I couldn't bring the pile of toys from my room down to their proper place in the basement only to have to go back up for these ones too (So I cleaned the hallway, which naturally led to the kid's room).  I was only going to pick up the toys, and then be done.  Back to my book, was the plan.  But the kid's room had bits of trash here and there that could easily go in my big box of trash that I had gathered from mine.  I might as well make one trip out of that job too.  Then all that was left was laundry.  I at least had the fortitude to put the laundry in the baskets and leave that for tomorrow.  In an hour's time I had cleaned the entire upstairs (minus the bathrooms - no round about reasoning was going to get me to start those yet) and all that was left was to vacuum. 

Vacuuming done, I stood at the top of the stairs looking back through the upstairs floor and thought, "It only took me an hour to do all this?"  I wondered why it was that cleaning it daily (as all good house wives must, right?) sounded so droll to me.  Certainly, it would take less time to maintain then to deep clean.  But, alas, what about my poor book?  The characters in it are still waiting for me to discover their fate.  Now that a good portion of my to do list is finished, I suppose it is only fair that I cease to neglect them.