Cleaning Up for Company

I'm having company for the rest of the week. My sister and her three little people are coming in about twelve hours. I was up late, late, late cleaning off the counter top in preparation of her visit and for making bushels and bushels of applesauce this week together. Anyway, so I was cleaning the kitchen up. You see, she's the clean one in the family. I'm the clutter bug. Maybe the best example is from the days when we shared a room as kids. She actually put tape down the floor of our bedroom to divide the room in two so she could have some "clean space" without my stuff "messing it all up." Too bad her side of the room was the side without the door. That meant she would have to cross into my side, the dirty side, to leave the room. A fight ensued...mom came in...tape was removed. I also remember a blue dresser we shared for a while. It had two doors on the bottom that swung open. To latch it closed you had to have both sides close together. My stuff was always falling out and making it so she couldn't close her side. Made her nuts. Know what else made her nuts? Oh, gosh, I'm all giggly just thinking about it! She would make her bed every morning. It was perfect. Sheets and bedspread tucked and smoothed to perfection. I would get my sheets up in the general direction of the pillow area and throw the bedspread over the top. Good enough for me. Here's the good part. When she was gone, I'd go over to her side and press my finger ever so gently into the middle of her bed to cause just the slightest of wrinkles in her bedspread. It would make her go bazerk! My poor mother. We did NOT get along. Don't worry. We're great friends now, but it wasn't pretty for a long, long, long time. Like from her birth until she was about 16. Of course, most of the time, she started it. Not me. I was just standing there doing nothing. So I cleaned and organized and put away all sorts of stuff. Piles shrunk by measurable quantities. Many items were returned to their rightful places. The recycling bin received generous donations, as did the trash when I finally gave up on the ginormous stack of broken toys of dollar store quality that just happened to fall in. Then the kids woke up this morning. Time's up. I did a little more this morning to dejunk the place, but didn't get far with Jacob and Maddie. Kristie will never notice, but I made a huge dent in the messes strewn all throughout our house. I worked hard. So I felt tired tonight after last night and then picking apples solo with three kids for three hours and the long drive to the orchard and back out in the lovely countryside of Virginia. Instead of scrubbing the toilets tonight after the kids went to bed I caught up on all ya'lls blogs. Yep I did. Read everyone. If you wrote in the last five days I read it. And that's alot of reading, folks. A lot. Then I talked to the hubby for an hour updating him on the exciting news of the day and the small glimmer of hope that Maddie might be coming around to potty training. Now I've sufficiently rested myself from the labors of the day so I'm ready for bed. Maybe I can scrub a toilet or two during my sanity window tomorrow morning while Ben is at kindergarten, Maddie is at preschool and Jacob naps. Cross your fingers and say your prayers that he naps at the appropriate time tomorrow. If not, my awesome tidy sister might see a dirty bathroom. Gasp!! It wouldn't be the first time I was caught. I hate cleaning so much that I always wait until the last possible second to do it. I remember one time in particular. Talk about last minute. Brian's parents were coming to visit us at college. Life was busy, blah, blah, blah, whine, whine, whine. I found every excuse in the book not to clean the bathroom until I actually heard a knock at the front door. I jumped to attention, ran into the bathroom, shut the door and cleaned that dumb bathroom while Brian greeted them. Tell me it isn't obvious when your guests come into your tinsy apartment and can hear you working and can smell the obvious scent of cleanser, etc. I knew I was caught. And I knew it wasn't the first time either. Embarrassing. Oh well. Like they didn't know I was a weiny before that dumb day anyway. Too late. Brian already said "I do" years earlier, sealing the fate of another totally innocent family. They're stuck with me. For better or for worse. In sickness and in health. With clean or dirty toilets. Oh heck, I could have cleaned all four toilets and Maddie's potty chairs while I wrote this. Sorry, K.