See ya Martha....you're outa here.

               Good-bye Martha. I'm waving the white flag. Not because I give up because I can't accomplish it but because I just don't want to. I don't have time for all that! I have a pretty clean house outside of this challenge, and i enjoy keeping my house clean. I think it teaches my kids something to have the house clean and I think it show respect to my husband who works long hours to provide everything for us. It shows him that I  appreciate what he does for us enough to take care of it. So I do clean every week. I clean every room every week. I just wasn't cleaning things to Martha's standards. But I do have five kids. All rooms aren't clean at the same time ever. Ever. And it was getting hard and frustrating to keep it up. Add laundry for seven people and yard work and life was kinda sucking in my house...for me anyway.

             So now that I have stopped cleaning to such high standards  the mom guilt starts. We all have that mom guilt. At least us moms do. I'm sure dads have their own set of guilt, but this is a blog by a mom so it's mom guilt. Your mom guilt may not show up in the form of a not spotless house but it's there somewhere else.  So here I sit, thinking should I care that my trash cans aren't wiped out every week, or should I care if my base boards are always clean or if every cabinets aren't totally organized? I probably shouldn't care. But for whatever reason I equate how clean my house is to how good of a wife/mom I am. Crazy. I'm pretty sure I am crazy!

        I shouldn't care because every week my house is clean. I clean the bathrooms, all of them. I clean the kitchen and I mop. I dust and vacuum everyday. I'm pretty sure that should be good enough. I have spent a lot of time cleaning these few weeks and I have heard from my kids several times about it. They wondered why I was cleaning again, because nothing seemed dirty, or wondering of I could play a game  with them or something else. I was so tired from cleaning that I didn't want to do much when I was done! Plus I'm gonna be honest and tell you that I hate board games. There, I said it. I hate them.

       So I am going to give up my rigorous cleaning and hopefully my crazy mom guilt and just get back to my basically clean cleaning schedule. You will still be able to eat off my kitchen floors, but you may only have a 10 minute window to do it. But if you are like me and you have lots of kids then you have learned to eat fast and you could probably eat a 5 course meal off my floor in that 10 minutes...and I would be happy to join you!