Housework

Got up with the flu this morning.  But I had to drag myself out of bed because Jeff had jury duty, the house cleaners were coming, and the house was cyclone-struck disaster.

I started in our bedroom, where I rolled up the sleeping bag and camp mats that had been out since Zach and Ezra slept with us when we had guests.  Then I headed to the boys’ room, where piles and piles of clothes had to be managed.  Clean clothes, dirty clothes, hand-me-downs my sister gave me last week, and clothes I had pulled out that no longer fit the boys.

In all, it took me two full hours to pick up the house.  No cleaning – just picking up piles- and even that only got rid of the worst offenders. Our house has always been on the verge of chaotic piles.  But homeschooling tipped us over the edge.  I simply can’t keep up with homeschool and work.

I’m not exaggerating when I say that I sometimes walk through the house squinting so that I can’t see just how bad it is.  I try to remind myself that a messy house is a small price to pay to spend my days teaching and learning with the boys.  I try to remind myself that the injunction Cleanliness is next to Godliness is not in fact in the Bible.  But I just can’t stand what has happened to my house in the last eight months. And I can’t imagine how we will ever recover.

By 9:30, though, I had managed to get things into some semblance of order, at least enough for the house cleaners to get to the grease and grime.  And the medicine I took to combat the body aches kicked in.  And the nausea eased up a bit.  So I got the kids ready to go to their Homeschool Naturalists class and sent them out the door while I looked for wherever I had shoved my shoes in my cleaning frenzy.

Just as I had finished putting them on, Zach walked in the door crying.  And covered in vomit.  There was vomit everywhere.  It looked like he had stuck his face in a bucket of vomit. Before I had time to contemplate how that could have happened, he hurled again.  After which I stripped him down, wiped him off, and put him in bed. Then I spent forty minutes cleaning up puke from the car, the driveway, the sidewalk, the stoop, and the entry to the house – all places he managed to throw up in less than five minutes.  I even spent some time picking puke chunks out of the neighbor’s garden.

At least I wasn’t feeling nauseous and having a hard time cleaning up puke. Oh wait…

Needless to say, we didn’t get any schoolwork done today.  But Zach is feeling better, I got through the day without throwing up, and the house is clean.  At least until we get up and destroy it tomorrow.