TGIF

It's Friday. Sweet Friday when my in-laws come take my older two children away for the afternoon and I can actually accomplish tasks. Accomplish tasks. You know, where you start something and finish it all in the same day.

This happens so rarely, that when it does, when I actually manage to finish something, I have such a sense of well-being, of peace and warmth, I hardly know what to do with myself. And I'm talking, here, about things outside the normal, have-to-get-done chores like laundry and cooking and cleaning. I'm talking about things like painting, hanging pictures, washing baseboards, organizing the Christmas decorations, sorting through clothes and dropping them off at Goodwill on the same day -- that kind of stuff.

And lest this makes me sound like some kind of hyper-clean, ultra-neat, organizational prodigy, let me state right here that I am none of these things. Even before I had kids I was cleaning-challenged, and 3 children later I have in large measure given up. Let me illustrate.

We have a wall between our living and dining rooms which is made of columns -- three columns on a 3-foot half-wall and then a full row of little columns that stretches all the way across the room. These little columns are near the ceiling. After my first child was born, my mom came over to clean for me and she dusted the little columns on their little ledge. She commented on how dusty they were and explained to me how to use my vacuum cleaner attachments to clean them. Two years later she came to clean after my second child was born and dusted the columns again. Two years after that, I dusted them because we were getting ready to paint them and even I know paint doesn't stick all that well to dust. So in the 10 years we've lived in this house, the columns have now been dusted a total of 3 times.

See? I am not going to make the cover of Clean Home anytime soon.

A lot of cleaning around here happens on a priority basis: closets get cleaned if people are moving to a new room or if we can't actually wedge any more clothes into the available space; floors get mopped when I can see smudges; massive cleaning occurs only if we've been foolish enough to invite people over for dinner. When my youngest was baptized, we had a houseful of people and this place absolutely sparkled. That was 5 months ago and there's been very little sparkle since.

Some cleaning occurs for mental health reasons, as in "Mommy is going to burst a blood vessel unless these toys are put away right now." This happens more than I am comfortable with.

So today is a day for me to get some stuff done. I'm not sure what that stuff will be. It will certainly be less than I hope to accomplish and it may be derailed by something more pressing, like putting away laundry or clearing off a portion of the kitchen counter so I can remember what color it is. But it will be quiet, and peaceful, and something, however small, will be finished at the end of the day.