Consider your audience.
This was very brilliant advice that I ignored several years ago, 14 to be exact. Still sleep-deprived and adjusting to a new life as a working mom, I insisted on slaving over a homemade birthday cake that looked like a princess castle — for a 1-year-old. The birthday girl, who, come to find out, had a wicked ear infection, failed to appreciate the elaborate dessert let alone a big, fat shindig.
Lesson learned.
Ever since then, I’ve Betty Crockered it for kid parties (only once did a 10-year-old guest with a refined palate call me out on the box mix.) This approach has saved me a lot of time and anguish.
And I definitely consider my audience when it comes to house cleaning.
My typical audience, you see, is not particularly concerned with cleanliness. Well, let me clarify: The kids are definitely not, my husband is. Occasionally. He did remark — once, as he looked over a counter in which every single inch was littered with dirty dishes — that the last time he saw a kitchen that gross was on the TV show “Cops.”
So, I clean. But barely. Why swab the entire mirror when a small, face-shaped zone free of toothpaste splatters will suffice? Why bother to vacuum when the carpet already looks like many battles were fought and blood was definitely shed on its beaten-down surface? Pointless.
And yet, I booked an appointment for an expensive steam cleaning anyway.
One online suggestion said how often you should steam clean depends on the number of people in your household. Well, that’s five plus 2.3 dogs, who are the majority shareholders in the stain business. Ideally, the carpet should probably be steam cleaned, oh, every five hours. Instead it’s probably been three, maybe four, years. To make matters worse, the carpet really and truly should have been replaced about an hour after installation. What kind of dummies install carpet in a color so light it’s called “Tilda Swinton taupe”?
But, renovation is futile. Especially with kids and dogs still in the house. So, we live with the carpet and battered leather sofas, which ended up relocated on the tile part of the floor along with everything else that wasn’t too heavy to scooch. I was happy to not be completely horrified by what was unearthed when we shifted the house’s contents — just a sock and a tennis ball and a shirt so lost that it was outgrown two years ago. Nowhere near as bad as the last time we did some major painting and discovered — spoiler alert, this is nasty and you may not want to read the rest of this paragraph — a wall smeared with boogers. Despite the fact that we have congested-family-of-seven-sized Kleenex boxes strategically placed every 2 feet in our house, this kid decided to wipe them on the wall. In my support group, Parent Survivors of Utterly Gross Things Kids Do (And Eat), I’ve learned that this is apparently a common behavior for those little squirts. Still and all, ewwww.
Without furniture to hide behind, the baseboards proudly displayed a thick coating of what looked like cremains. I couldn’t help myself: I wiped them down. And then I kept going, scrubbing off random smudges on the insides of the door jambs. I’d gone through three Magic Erasers by the time the steam-cleaner guy arrived for his superhuman task.
“Is there any urine in the carpet?” he asked.
The question made me both laugh and cringe. “You know it!”
Let me say, that dude worked magic on the carpet. By the time Pig Pens 1, 2 and 3 arrived home even they took notice of the state of cleanliness.
Not that they’ll keep it that way. Yeah, the clock is ticking. We need to relocate to a place better suited to our spill-filled, stain-filled lifestyle: a yurt. Preferably with a dirt floor.
