I gave up the notion of a tidy home long ago. Are you like me? Here’s a handy illustrated guide:
- You have at least one vase in your home with flowers mouldering in it since last Valentines Day.
- You’re actually starting to like tall grass and dandelions.
- You can use your laundry pile to change a lightbulb in the ceiling!
- Your eleven year old son wins first prize wtih the kitchen sink as his Science Fair project.
- You’d rather read a book with your kid than change the sheets.
When the housework starts to pile up, I like to do more important things, like enjoying time with my family. Don’t sweat the small stuff!
About The Animated Woman
Perfect
Twitter Name: 31_Amber_31
Does that mean you score 5/5 here?
Twitter Name: littleanimation
Hooray! I’m aiming low enough!
Twitter Name: thedgoddess
Story of my life…until my father0in-law made the assumed threat that they may be coming out soon, as in within the next month, so I’ve been working on making it appear that I don’t aim so low…
It’s often an accomplishment here if I only have 3 of the above on my list of guilty.
Twitter Name: gypsy_momma
Even the vague possibility of a house guest used to reduce me to a babbling fool. These days I have this line down pat: “Welcome! Please know that I suck as a hostess”. It doesn’t keep vistors away though. They just laugh and swat away the fruit flies. *sigh*
Twitter Name: littleanimation
Oh, it’s not for just any house guest…most of them I’d just hand them a broom & shovel & tell them they’re more than welcome to it if they have a problem with it. Father-in-law though is a totally different story.
Twitter Name: gypsy_momma
I’m….scared!
Twitter Name: littleanimation
We don’t have houseguests. Nobody is allowed into our house until it is clean. I believe our first scheduled houseguest will be sometime around 2035.
By then, I expect we’ll have robotic maids to do all the cleaning for us… Either that, or the robots will have taken over and *we’ll* be the maids doing all the cleaning. Either way, our house will be clean then and everyone’s invited over!
Twitter Name: TechyDad
Yay! I am aiming low enough! Happy to know I am among the greats like you!
Aiming low will get you high. Well, known fact.
Twitter Name: littleanimation
Thank you. And my dust bunnies thank you.
I’m so glad that I’m not the only one! I’ve been aiming low for years :)
Twitter Name: kathym425
Seems like there’s a bunch of us down here LOL!
Twitter Name: littleanimation
I’m aiming WAY low. Not only does my laundry pile never get lower than 3 feet deep, but the flowers in my house aren’t even real. They’re plastic, yo.
Word.
Twitter Name: JWMoxie
BAAHAHAHAAAHA!
“plastic,yo”
I love it.
Twitter Name: littleanimation
Ours are plastic too. In fact, our wedding flowers were artificial flowers because my wife hates seeing flowers die. (That’s why I fail #1… She doesn’t like me buying her flowers since they just die anyway.) Of course, the big bunch of artificial flowers is tough to dust and may or may not be harboring very real spiders. So I think that should count towards #1 for me.
Twitter Name: TechyDad
LOVE this.
Flowers? In the house?
Twitter Name: mimicat12
They used to be flowers, a long, long, LONG time ago.
Twitter Name: littleanimation
I am clearly a BOSS at this. What if you have an ENTIRE ROOM in your home dedicated to unfolded laundry and it takes your 7 year old no less than 30 minutes each morning to dig through this avalanche to find a pair of (semi) matching socks and some undies? #Winning
Twitter Name: coolwhipmom
Your child is obviously Aiming Too High. My girls started a fashion trend in grade 6 by wearing unmatching socks. True story!
Great post and illustrations :)
Yeah! Future Low Aimers!
Twitter Name: littleanimation
Oh how I like tall grass and dandelions!! Just think of all those wishes that dandelion fluff brings.
Twitter Name: momadabsurdum
I wish for a maid. And a cook.
Twitter Name: littleanimation
Oh I love you! We moved in to this house in July. Just today I was looking at:
-the wilted flowers on the counter (from when we moved in
-the weeds (it’s been too dry for the grass to grow, but the weeds will rule the universe
-the @#$ing laundry pile that my husband complains about moving off the bed rather than folding one shirt
and I may have cried a little bit when I looked in the kitchen sink…I also plot the demise of 10000 fruit flies, and I’m trying to figure out why I didn’t realize the 22 panel doors might look pretty, but it turns out they each have about a gabillion extra little ledges that each need to be dusted? Gah. I can add dusty doors to my list.
Twitter Name: therealneeroc
YOU WIN!! No – no, wait. I have dusty picture frames. I still win.
Twitter Name: littleanimation
LOL!!! Love it!!!
#1. Nope, started asking for Sees when I found that 3 month (ok maybe 8 month) old dead flowers smell like poop when you DO finally chuck them. *blush*
#2. Up until last year the kids on our block would cry when we cut our grass because it was ‘better then Disneyland’ BUT my mother-in-law demanded to have her gardeners out here once a week after we had the baby. She can be no fun at times.
#3. hehehe OoooOooOOOoooo yeah, that piles going nowhere fast. ;-)
#4. I do the dishes sometimes, but I’ve found that having a dead dishwasher is the best place to stash the gross stuff if the in-laws are on their way over.
#5. You’re supposed to change those? Well, maybe once a year, but it just adds to #3… Plus reading is more fun!!! And being with the kids is the bestest. :-)
One more to the list — my dust bunnies have mutated into dust wildebeests!
I wonder, am I aiming low enough?
Sarah
Twitter Name: SarahBWinters
“a dead dishwasher is the best place to stash the gross stuff”
Best idea ever.
Twitter Name: littleanimation
I’ve stored really good shoes in the oven.
I. Kid. You. Not.
I have no shame. Here, anyway.
Twitter Name: ASassyRedhead
No lie, I just threw away my Valentine’s day flowers today, but I still have a mountain of clean laundry to fold! You always post real talk!
Twitter Name: MILF_Squared
Summer, you threw AWAY your flowers??? My dear, you are aiming too high. Go now and retrieve them from the garbage LOL!!
Twitter Name: littleanimation
Despite fear of appearing like I’m aiming too high (and trust me that I’m not…I scored 5/5 on this test!), I thought I’d share my super-easy tip on how to get rid of fruit flies: Simply leave an empty bottle of red wine out for about a week (or however long it normally takes to finally throw the bottle in the recycling bin), making sure it still has a wee bit of wine left on the bottom. The fruity wine draws them to it, and something to do with the fermentation process traps the buggers in there, where they proceed to suffocate and die! mmwaHAHAHA!!! (my poor attempt at evil internet laughter…)
Thanks for this AWESOME tip, Tezzie. I’m going to try it out in my car right now! We’ve had fruit flies in there for about a year and I can’t figure out where they’re coming from…
Twitter Name: littleanimation
I moved into this house in December. I have an old (ridiculously heavy) decorative screen thing that I am using to block access to the formal living/dining area so that nobody can see in there when they come to the front door. That’s where all of the unpacked boxes and (allegedly) several loads of clean laundry are hidden. Things get unpacked as they are needed. Decorative items are not terribly “needed” at this point. Clothes draped strategically across the furniture is decorative right? Also? Seeing as how this house has ZERO bookcases and the old house had, probably seven, there should be boxes of books in there when I die. I am expecting the camera crew & Dr. Zazio from “Hoarders” to show up any day now.
The one bonus of living in a drought stricken area? I haven’t had to worry about mowing or weeding. However, my trees are a little peeved with me. Also, since I haven’t watered, my foundation hasn’t been watered (why didn’t anyone tell me you were supposed to do that?) so now my house sits at a bit of an angle & my doors are all wonky. Good times.
Twitter Name: BuffiSugarMommy
Ah the joys of home ownership. There are days when I wish I was renting again so I could just call up the landlord and yell at him to get things fixed instead of needing to fix things myself. Maybe then my peeling paint would be fixed (instead of sitting there for years), my front door lock would be replaced (locks fine but key doesn’t unlock it) and that gap in my back stairs where I can see daylight would be fixed with something other than layers of duct tape.
Twitter Name: TechyDad
Clothes piled on the floor? Never.
I just pull’em straight out of the dryer.
And if more occasionally get thrown in to be dried…well, those already in there, once again get fluffed.
And I wonder why I’m single.
Twitter Name: ASassyRedhead
Sometimes the lines between the piles of clean laundry and dirty laundry get blurred and my husband accidentally puts on something dirty. Why bother him with the truth?
Twitter Name: Unknown Mami
If there are no visible stains and you can’t smell it when you’re standing close to him, is it really dirty? I think not. Free yourself, my friend….
Twitter Name: BuffiSugarMommy
Let’s see:
1) My wife doesn’t like flowers (see above comment) but we do have artificial flowers that I never dust and thus might have spiders living in them. I call that a check. I also have some dried mint leaves from our garden in the kitchen that I’m going to freeze… one of these days. (No, really, I’m going to!)
2) Sadly, our grass can’t grow that long because 90% of our “grass” is actually weeds. When it’s cut short, our lawn looks amazing. When it’s left to grow, though, the weedy nature of our lawn becomes apparent.
3) There’s a whole story behind this, but we have a “big bindura” that gets moved to the bed every morning and then to a dining room chair every night. I count it as my weight lifting exercise. See? Aiming Low can keep you fit!
4) Our clean dishes are kept in the dishwasher until they are needed/the sink is overflowing and stinky. Then the dishwasher is cleaned out and the sink is scrubbed. (No comment on the obstacle course required to reach the sink/dishwasher.)
5) Wait. You can change sheets? I know we do this in the winter to put on warmer flannel sheets and in the spring to put on cooler non-flannel sheets, but you can do this more than twice a year? (Oh, wait. That must be part of the joke. Right?)
Twitter Name: TechyDad
That’s how it works at my house – November = Flannel Sheets on….June = Flannel Sheets off, lightweight cotton on. Unless someone pees the bed or something gets spilled. And then it depends. Ew. I may have just grossed myself out.
Twitter Name: BuffiSugarMommy