Vacuuming
With two monkeys posing as children in this house, hindering my every move, I will often get to the end of a day, collapse, and think to myself, Nothing useful got done today!
I often just count myself lucky to have gotten the kids fed and down for naps at all the right times, and even then I may have to fight them every step of the way.
As you can imagine, this builds up a lot of frustration, which I need a harmless outlet for, lest I start going bananas on the kids.
I have discovered my outlet. I vacuum.
The Webmaster and I received an Oreck XL as a wedding gift from my mother’s (now former) boss, and it has been a pretty great vacuum cleaner. But I never thought of using it for therapy until just recently.
One of the best things about the vacuum cleaner is that it makes more noise than both kids, and they respect that – and the person wielding it. I like that power. And simply vacuuming up (trust me, with two kids we need to vacuum early and often) is an accomplishment in itself. Cleaner carpets with minimal effort. If I’ve done nothing else in the day, at least I’ve done that much.
The kids have a love/hate relationship with the vacuum cleaner. Ane was completely freaked out by it as a baby, but now she has a working concept of what it does. She still doesn’t like all the noise, but likes to parallel play alongside me with Tad’s popper. She will sometimes also just sit on the couch quietly, observing the whole process. Personally, I think she’s trying to figure out how to make the vacuum cleaner eat her brother the same way it eats up Cheerio crumbs.
Tad, on the other hand, still hates the sound and the fury, but he respects it. He prefers to watch from a distance, yet he craves this power of making noise for his own. He’s figured out that there is a button, and there is an outlet and a plug, but has not quite discovered how all three work together. Once, I had my back turned to him and he pushed the vacuum button to “on” a split second before I plugged it in. The sudden roaring to life of the sucking machine startled me, but scared the crap out of him, since he was so close to it and was caught totally off-guard. I had to switch it off and get him calmed down. He hasn’t tried that since.
So, if you come over to my house and see a freshly vacuumed carpet and floor (the Oreck is great on bare floors, too), be warned: the kids have been the inmates running the asylum, and I probably haven’t gotten anything else done. But at least the floor is clean and has nice vacuum tracks in the carpet.
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March 28th, 2007 09:11
Our first vacuum was a dud, I don’t even remember the brand, but it didn’t last one year. We now have a Dirt Devil that’s OK, but when it dies, I want an Oreck.
Little Cousin usually camps on the couch while we’re vacuuming. Sometimes she’ll run up to it (when one of us is using it) then run away from it as it moves toward her, pretending to be scared. I think she just wants the excuse to scream.
June 19th, 2007 09:19
[…] I will admit, my housekeeping skills are not always up to par. I do keep the dust bunnies at bay and do plenty of therapeutic vacuuming, and I keep on top of the laundry (which is a chore with a family of four with two toddlers and a stain-obessed mother), but for some reason, I really got the kids’ rooms tidy this last weekend, and Ane did some (child-like) cleaning up of her own room as well. Of course, she also asked me to reorganize all her books in her bookcase this morning, but that’s another story. […]