gnomes ~

In my house, I am certain that there lives a little gnome…and when no one is looking he runs through the house throwing, tossing and disheveling all that he encounters. He opens the cabinets and leaves them open, he takes trash and places it all around the house in inconspicuous places, he fills my sink with dirty dishes that I have no memory whatsoever of using, he leaves half full sippy cups and random articles of clothing laying around the stairs and the floor …and to top it off…he even plucks out my dog’s hair and leaves little clumps of it everywhere! And, he does all this in what seems like only minutes since I last picked up the house!!! How does he do that?

Well the only way I can continue to keep this little gnome from entirely disrupting my house beyond repair is to stay one step behind him! I can’t let him get too far ahead of me or I am sure my house will actually cave in upon itself! So I do two “clean sweeps” every day…one in the morning and one in the evening…

I am NOT talking about cleaning…just straightening up…It is amazing how I can go to bed on a Saturday night with the house straight and return from church the very next day to a house that looks like a tornado flipped it high in the air shaking up everything inside...or maybe the gnome comes out while we are all away (that is my kids theory, anyway)…either way…I have to find two times a day for about 5 – 10 minutes to literally walk the house from one end to the other straightening up the place…

Here is exactly what I did just now in my 2nd clean sweep…I put the dirty dishes in the dishwasher, I put the kids clothes on the stairs, I put the pillows and throw blanket back on the couch, I threw away the trash from our “to go” lunch, I put all the dog toys back in the “dog toy basket,” I flushed a few toilets, closed a few cabinets, and threw away Saturday’s newspaper …wheeweee…and all of that took about 7 minutes, but the place feels 7 million times cleaner!

Maybe someday I will catch that gnome right in the act…plucking clumps of little Sparky’s fur and depositing it on my favorite throw blanket, but until then I am just going to do my best to keep one step behind him everyday …and you know… I think I am gaining on him!