Someone should have warned me...

I finally have a few minutes to myself to write for a bit. The little man is down for a nap and Nicole has finished up with her school work for the day and is outside playing on the swing set. Ahhhhh, the sweet sound of silence! (For now) Now I probably should be cleaning, but cleaning has to do with what I'm writing about today, so at least I'm thinking about it.

Someone should have warned me...about how gross kids are. The scenario playing out in my house for the past 24 hours has to do with missing cleaning equipment. First and foremost is the fact that the plunger is missing. Now let me explain how I found this out. The toilet in the kid’s bathroom isn't the greatest and backs up occasionally, hence the need for a plunger. Late yesterday morning it had backed up again. Nicole came casually strolling into the basement where I was doing laundry and said “Mom, the toilet is going over.” That was it. She then walked back upstairs and into the living room to turn on the TV while I rushed frantically into the bathroom to check out how bad it was. I grabbed some towels and threw them onto the floor around the toilet and reached around the side to grab the plunger and only found air. Ummmm, ok. “Where’s the plunger?” I asked. Nicole says “I don’t know because I don’t use it.” I asked Brandon the same thing and got “Inanooooo” as he raises his hands up and shrugs his shoulders innocently. (Translated toddler talk is: I don’t know)

So now I'm left with a clogged toilet and can not find the plunger. I begin to search frantically through the house to figure out where exactly a plunger would go. It is now 24 hours later and I still have not found the plunger and am giving in to the fact that it somehow walked off the job and left the house. I also have not figured out why anyone felt the need to remove the plunger from its home in the bathroom. So off to the store I shall go to purchase a new one.

The children in my house must think that if the cleaning supplies are gone, they will not have to clean. In the last year I have had to purchase 3 new cleaning buckets (2 of which were in the last month). Along with the missing cleaning buckets, the window cleaner, mop, scrubby pads, air freshener, etc. all disappear randomly. Now these items did not disappear due to being empty, over used or broken. These items all went missing within a week or two of being purchased. The kids all have age appropriate chores and not a huge amount of chores either as I’m home all day to try and keep some sense of order in the house. They are supposed to keep their rooms and the playroom cleaned up and organized. The boys have outside chores ranging from snow shoveling, brush clean up, taking out the garbage, etc. The girls have to do dishes nightly. No, we're not lucky enough to own a dishwasher as I have precious little cupboard space. On Saturday's we do all the dusting, vacuuming, mopping, bathrooms, etc. And when I say we, I really mean me. Most of the time I send the kids outside and put them in charge of the little man so I can get down and get the house clean. When I'm finished I can actually sit in the cleanliness for a precious few moments before the kids come in and destroy it all over again.

Kids are gross and someone should have warned me. I'm almost positive that they would be perfectly happy living in filth as long as it didn't require them to lift a finger near a cleaning product. With that said, I'm off to the store to purchase a new plunger and restock the cleaning supplies, again. Then I'll be back home to use my brand new bucket and cleaning items, until the next time they all go on strike and disappear.