The deal with cleaning.

So here's the deal. We all love living and being in a clean house, right?

We had a lesson on Sunday 13 Feb (Gospel Principles) in Relief Society about Work. Some sisters raised the point that they grew up without maids and have been cleaning their whole lives so they love it and don't know how else it can / could be. I then added my 50c worth and said that I too grew up without a maid and we'd clean the house every Saturday as a family, I hated it back then and still hate it today. However, we do it with our kids every Saturday. We all wake up, clean the house and then we have the rest of the day to mess it up again, I mean, enjoy it ;) I refuse to be the family maid and clean up after everyone else. I also want my kids to understand that they are responsible for the mess they make and that "Mommy Dearest" won't be slave to their mess-creating ways.

So while doing laundry (or for those South Africans out there *hehehe*, 'the washing') I got to thinking about it [Yes, I do a lot of my thinking while performing mindless tasks such as this.] and I came to the conclusion that although I love to have a clean house and I want my kids to grow up knowing that it's good to live in a clean house which means they must learn to pick up after themselves, I again made peace with the fact that we live in a house with children. Children make a mess - not always a dirty mess, mostly just with leaving toys / clothes / shoes etc. lying around - and because I'm not going to get all anal about it and cause myself extra stress by fighting with them all day long about it, our house will sometimes be messy if people come to visit. Like it or lump it.