Rain Day.

I believe there are three levels of cleaning one’s house. These levels are familiar to all, although I’ve been in enough households to know that some people rarely make it passed beyond the first or second level. Just the same, a level one cleaning consists of moving items around and out of the way, picking up items off the floor– usually to place in larger piles to be dealt with at a later date, doing the dishes, and putting away whatever has been used throughout the day, somewhere. This is the type of cleaning one does immediately after receiving a phone call from family or friends telling them they’ll be over in 30 minutes for a visit; or late at night just after the kids have gone to bed so that one’s wife (mine in this case) will not pull her hair out in frustration over the mess one’s left for her to contend with before she takes off to work at 6 a.m. the following morning. In our house, a level one cleaning means putting the kid’s toys in the living room’s multicolored bins and baskets, wiping down the kitchen table and countertops, emptying and refilling the diaper supply basket, and stacking everything else in neat little piles on that same table and those same countertops to be taken care of later on. A level two cleaning involves a little more time, effort, and kid juggling. It includes moving furniture and large toys while vacuuming and dusting, washing and folding and putting away laundry, and a general sorting of toys, papers, projects, etc. into their proper places or at alternative sites. A level three cleaning, commonly known as spring-cleaning, takes the most time, most effort, and most patience. Over the last two days we’ve completed a selective spring-cleaning of the kid’s toys, and what an accomplishment it has been!

My wife and I are adventurous creatures, always have been and always will be. I fondly remember either being kicked out of the house by my mother for fighting with my older brother or taking off and trekking through the woods for long hours during the day. Later in life I continued my escapades by hiking through the woods or riding my motorcycle on the sharpest serpentine roads I could find. Adrianne also affectionately reminisces about taking her horse and galloping down old railroad tracks, up and over hills and pastures, and through countless open fields in her youth. So today, it’s not too hard to imagine why Mom and Dad like to go “bye-bye” quite often. In doing so, we often find ourselves at the doors of Wal-Mart, Target, Borders, and Barns and Noble picking up this and that for the kids. The kid’s also have generous family members and very generous grandparents. So today’s cleaning was more than a necessity.

I would like to say that this week’s cleaning was routine. It wasn’t. We have had so many rainy days these last two weeks that I’ve resorted to changing the kid’s clothing two or three times a day because of how soaked the backyard is. I’ve even had to resort to putting superglue on my toes because the skin has cracked from continual submersion in the muck and mud that separates our lawn from the creek behind the house. I’ve also used and the kids have played with just about every toy we own, causing pieces and parts of different toys to become intermingled beyond the expected accidental mixing.

Besides cleaning up a little clutter, we have been able to give away most of the out-grown toys to expecting mothers or to a local church. We’ve been able to reunite long-lost missing pieces, make once incomplete toys useful again, and organize the toys by ability level. In other words, I can now take an age appropriate toy off of one shelf and hand it to Taylor and take an ability appropriate toy off another shelf and hand it to Simon, without either one wanting the other’s toy. And since today’s forecasts, tomorrow’s forecast, and the next three days’ worth of forecasts all call for rain, the spring-cleaning could not have come at a better time.