Holy Moly Motherhood By Alana Smith: Spring clean

Spring! Well, almost.

I can feel it coming. Slowly, but surely. The grass starts to grow and I get excited for new beginnings. And with that comes the urge to clean, organize, and get my house out of hibernation. Let it feel the sunshine. Give it some much needed fresh air. Spring clean.

But the list of cleaning tasks is quite daunting, and I’m the type of person who wants to do it all, right this second. Dusting places that never get dusted, washing windows, and filling flower pots. It’s a lot. But since I have two little humans to care for and a job that makes me leave the house, I’ll just have to tackle this list a little at a time.

These days, checking chores off my list is often hard to do, especially with kiddos running around. I love a clean house, but I tend to have some sort of cleaning attention deficit. I’ll start one thing, and then start another, and another. Because I want everything to be clean at once. Then I’ll find myself knee deep in a basket of toys, trying to find Mr. Potato Head’s ear. It goes something like this:

Start vacuuming … vacuum one room … forget to start the washer … go get laundry … wash clothes … wonder how so much lint can accumulate in one place … worry lint will start a house fire … clean lint behind dryer … kill a few ants … go write a note to call the bug man … notice the state of the junk drawer when getting notepad … start organizing the tape and screw drivers … agonize over keeping or tossing some old super glue … decide to keep it in case of a super glue emergency … notice spaghetti sauce on the cabinet below … wonder how we haven’t seen a week-old spaghetti spillage … start Magic Eraser-ing cabinet … then the walls … forget all about vacuuming until someone asks for a snack, and then spills it in the floor.

Holy moly.

I know I’m not alone in this, and I imagine if I would just tackle one task fully, I would be less stressed on cleaning day (which is never a full day uninterrupted and there’s never enough time). Motherhood, right?

On that note, happy spring cleaning to you all! Godspeed. We got this.

Alana is a nurse anesthetist, writer and boy mom (ages 7 and 2), who lives in north Shelby County with her husband, kids and Boxer, Sam. When she’s not writing or chasing little humans, she can usually be found in the aisles of Target. She shares her writings at Holy Moly Motherhood (on Facebook and Instagram), where she takes on all things motherhood and marriage.