Super Mom

Today I bartered with Jess: new maternity clothes for manual labor. We swung by Wal-mart on the way back from the mall to pick up some cleaning supplies and decided to try this new Kaboom cleaner that sprays on blue and turns to white when the dirt has been absorbed. Will it work? Probably not. But at the time, the thought of not scrubbing outweighed that probability. Later that evening, Joshy had come in from playing outside and was poking his nose into what was going on in the house. Seeing the Kaboom spray on the counter, he told Jessi that it was what you spray blue and when it is white you rinse it off. She said, "Where did you learn that?". His response? "I saw it on tv."

Between that and his utter shock and awe when walking into a room that is clean, that little boy is advertising the traits no parent wants highlighted. Do I let them watch tv in the evenings? Yes. Do I have a less than clean house? Perhaps. Do I want the world to know that? No. I want them to picture me with my red checkered apron, fresh pie in the oven, birds chirping in the window, sun shining through my sparkling clean panes onto my table set with napkin origami. Are my children watching television? Of course not. They are memorizing the names of the presidents and jumping rope in knee socks. It is easy to hide reality when the boys were a few months and 3 but now the jig is up. I can no longer hide the laundry that occasionally gets calf deep. The need to sometimes say "just go watch tv". Joshy has molded to the world we have formed for him and is marked with cleaner commercials and unmade beds. My illusions of Martha Stewart are officially dead. They were frankenstien-ish before, but now the coroner has called it. All that's left is the truth of parents who are too tired to think when they get home and make spaghetti on auto-pilot. That leave their towels on the floor and mail in piles. Allow playing with the kids to be their excuse to not clean dishes. Think about chocolate cake, all the time. Well, the last one might just be me. I am exhausted and average and fairly certain I ran over Suzie Homemaker with my car. I love my children, diet coke and WebMD and would rather rip off my toenails than clean...anything. But my unclean, tv watching self has turned average into an art. And my boys are happy with average, so that feels like perfection to me.