The Grandma Circuit: Cleaning For Visitors

Grandma lives about three hours away. So every Christmas, she drives to our house and spends the week of Christmas visiting our home. It's such a blessing to have her wake up and watch the boys open their gifts on Christmas morning.

Know what is not a blessing? I cannot get that stupid "Grandma Got Run Over by a Reindeer" song out of my head. I keep singing it without realizing it. Think my mother-in-law will be offended if I sing it out loud? Eek.

(This is a picture of Maw Maw, not Grandma. Maw Maw lives nearby, so I had a handy picture of her with Loki and my nephew at Loki's school Christmas play.)

I was sick this weekend, so my husband cleaned the house in anticipation of his mom's arrival.

Let me take a second here to remind my readers who live with others that cleaning is NOT your job just because you are a female, wife, or the "neat" one. Sure, if one of the people in the home stays home and the other works outside of the home, the at-home person usually has more time to cook and clean and probably ought to divide the labor accordingly. But please read "The Second Shift." It's an old book, but the sociological theory that it raises has been proven time and time again; couples who work together at blessing the home stay together longer and have stronger relationships. So, if you work outside the home, make a point to help out. If you live in the home, use some of the time to clean, but invite others (and by "invite," I mean "coerce and demand") to help out.

I wonder if the reason that I love to watch Sister Wives so much is because of the way everyone helps out.

{climbs gingerly off my kind of embarrassing soapbox}

Since Grandma is going to be a house guest and since we are taking Christmas morning pictures in the house, simple cleaning on Saturday was not enough by Monday morning. Little things were dirty again or left out on tables and counters.

I did the circuit.

The circuit means that I started in one room and went through the entire house, room by room, taking care of anything that was out of place and noting anything that needed cleaning on my dashboard in my planner.

That's it. It's simple and effective. After doing the circuit, I went back and did or assigned (to the kids, who are home for the holidays) the minimal cleaning left in the public and guest areas and scratched them off of my dashboard. (The dusty corner of my bedroom can wait until next week. That got moved to next week's task list.) There wasn't much to clean, due to my husband's hard work this weekend.

Let's all take a second and applaud my husband, who cleaned on his weekend off without complaint and on his own without nagging! {a great big Loyal Reader round of applause}

In about thirty minutes, my house was ready for company. There is room in the kitchen to make reindeer food, an empty space on the side table for a guest to place a book or a cup of coffee, and a designated spot for my planner for last minute notes, like reminders to send the elf back to the North Pole (and a note of the location of the North Pole on my locations pages in my planner).

On this Night Before the Night Before Christmas, go ahead and try the circuit. If your house is too cluttered, start doing a daily Circuit of Threes. Basically, you do the circuit, but only do the three things in each room that jump out at you. You do it daily until the clutter is all gone.

Now, back to busy, busy, busy being good!

Etcetera.