Seven minutes

Why does seem so impossible to get off the couch and spend seven minutes tidying up a room?

I'm not talking about my children (although getting them to clean the playroom is seemingly impossible sometimes), I'm talking about me.

All day I've been bugged about how messy the living room and dining room looked.  It's not that they were super dirty or horrible, just messy:  untidy pile of school papers on the couch, next to one baby sock (dirty), one baby shirt (mostly clean), and the diaper wipe container.  A few random toys--stuffed soccer ball, two toy cars, etc--scattered around the floor.  A string cheese wrapper, some junk mail envelopes, a pile of spilled goldfish crackers littered the dining room floor, and on the table the dishes from lunch still sat.

All of this made the house look much worse than it actually was.  And I let it all sit there for most of the day.

A couple of minutes ago I got up to get something for a child, and decided that before I sat back down on the couch and let the internet mesmerize me again, I would take fifteen minutes and just clean up what I could.  It took me less than seven minutes to get the living/dining rooms into a state I would be unembarrassed by a surprise visitor.  Seven minutes.  That is all.

So I hereby announce a new resolution for myself (hey, it's almost April, why not a Spring Resolution?):  I will spend at least seven minutes a day, tidying the house.  (Dishes and laundry don't count.  They have to happen anyway.)  And if all I manage is seven minutes, at least my house is seven minutes cleaner than it was previously, right?

So next time you come over, compliment me on my seven-minute-clean house.  Heh.
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What I did with the other 23 hours and 53 minutes today (so far):  grocery shopping, grocery putting-away (a task of its own, to be sure), child-dressing, child-feeding, child-nuturing/rearing/listening to the plot of the latest "Arthur" episode, Em to the dentist, and making little Easter baskets for some people who have helped us a ton.  (Want a tip?  Take treats to your doctor's office staff every so often.  It's always good to be on their best side, for timely same-day appointments and help with immunization records.)

I was absurdly pleased with how cute they ended up being:

I bought the baskets on clearance last year (or maybe the year before), and then I cut out cardboard to fit halfway down in the baskets.  Zee and Em carefully washed and dried all the strawberries, and I dipped them in chocolate.  We punched holes into the cardboard with the skewers, and hid the cardboard with Easter grass and jellybeans and Peeps.  All told, with such able helpers (and I'm not being sarcastic, they really were helpful), it only took us an hour to do everything.  Cheap, simple, and fun.  (Except delivery and cleanup took longer than that.  But isn't it always that way?)