Destroying The Evidence

Today we are doing a thorough clean on the main floor of the house.  The kind that involves moving furniture and scrubbing the floors.  I doubt I'll get to the bathroom or shrink the laundry pile enough to be able to clean the floor underneath it, but that's okay.  We are still making major progress.

I used to be amazed at how quickly the house could become a completely horrifying disaster.  If we skip chores for ONE day the state of the house is beyond horrific.  When we work hard daily on our chores our house is a mess.  Which is something I am learning to accept and not be TOO embarrassed by.  As long as it is a living mess as opposed to a stagnant mess, I'm okay with it.

We have a chore chart that is quite detailed, including daily chores for Josh and I.  A chore chart is only as good as its enforcers though, so again, if I have a lazy day or two, or I get sick, or 4 out of 6 kids begin projectile vomiting on a 20 minute rotation, we dip back into the level of unspeakable horrors.

A couple of years ago I saw an episode of Oprah and she was talking to a woman who had her children taken away.  She was showing pictures of the woman's house which was certainly a disaster.  Oprah was asking the woman how she let her house get that bad and the woman said she hadn't cleaned in a couple of weeks.  Oprah staunchly rejected her claim and stated that that was more than a couple of weeks worth of mess, that it had clearly been months.  Now, this woman lost her children for many more reasons than having a messy house - she was abusive and negligent - but that part about the mess stuck with me, because my house can really and truly look that bad after a couple of days. 

So of course, my imagination kicks into overdrive.  I imagine myself standing before a judge pleading my case, "No really judge, two days ago it was spotless, for at least five minutes, I swear!"  And I imagine having my defense staunchly rejected and having to be put on a list of registered housekeeping offenders.

So, on a day like today, when we are cleaning so thoroughly, I keep thinking I should take photographic evidence with a digital time stamp to prove, "at this date and time, the house was this clean" and begging the court to submit my photos to digital forensics people or whoever would be able to examine my digital camera card and declare that I had not altered the date and I had indeed had a very clean house on that date.

So, back to mopping for me, and maybe I'll actually get around to photographing it this time before all of the physical evidence of cleanliness is destroyed.