Why have a table?

Why have a table, anyway? It doesn’t make sense to have to clean two surfaces three, maybe more, times a day. If I have to clean the floor after every meal, why not eliminate the table completely? Then I will only have one surface to clean. Let me rewind a minute. This all started, and yes my narcissistic side rears it’s ugly head, when I allowed each one of my daughters to invite a friend over on Saturday for a play date. Now if you can’t do the simple math, I will help you out. That would be six girls running around my house. Follow me here. I do have a reason for all this torture, but it is definitely self-serving. The goal is to force me into cleaning my house. If I have people coming over, I have a deadline to get my house clean. Otherwise, you really don’t want to know what levels I will stoop to in order not to clean my house (if you’re not good with chaos, you might not want to show up unexpectedly). And I always clean the night before or the place is trashed before the guests arrive (mistake number one).

Since I have had children, I have turned into a surface cleaner due to the time factor. Let’s face it, it just takes too dam long to clean everything. So I make due by ignoring things for example, cabinets. My cabinets are on the dark side so a lot of things don’t show up in a glance. So I begin picking up the kitchen (paperwork is my arch enemy next to the laundry), those everyday glances turned into inspecting (mistake number two) and I find myself scrubbing down the cabinets. Between the dust that has collected on the raised parts of the cabinets and caked on food that I had never noticed before, I freaked out. God, there was some kind of barbecue sauce on one of the bottom cabinets. WE HAVEN’T HAD ANYTHING WITH BARBECUE SAUCE SINCE THE FALL. As soon as, I was down to this floor level everything was becoming really clear. I crawled over to the table (mistake number three). You don’t even want to know what I found. We have a four leg table with six chairs. Really, if the math is still too hard, allow me. That is 28 legs of wood. Every leg had something caked on it. It wasn’t the outside of the legs where things would have been easily noticable. I’m talking about the inside part of the leg. You know when the milk splatters all over the floor or the bowl of apple sauce is accidently knocked off the table and lands on the floor upside down. All this splatter has a bounce factor. This little awakening cost me seven and half hours of cleaning instead of four intended hours of cleaning. Obviously, this leads me back to the question, why have a table?

Sometimes ignorance is bliss.

By the time I was done cleaning it was 2:30 in the morning. I dragged myself to bed with a back ache from all the free manual labor I just did and exhausted to the bone. But my house was clean. Not even five minutes had passed when child number three comes bouncing into the room wide awake ready to play with a huge happy grin on her face. She says, "Hi Mommy!"