I am currently the only adult in the house.
There are some very good sides to that.
And there are also some very bad sides.
The good side is that I can decide what colors the paint is bought in. Yes, the stairwell walls are going to be bright yellow and the banister eggplant purple.
The bad side is that I’m ultimately responsible for just about everything in this little bit of the universe. That’s a lot of bills to pay with not much of a paycheck.
Since the boys left there has been a grand cleaning, sorting and chucking going on. It’s a daunting task but by focusing on one room at a time it’s a bit more manageable.
The youngest has been working on clearing out her room for the last month or so.
She has literally laid hands to everything she owns and done one of three things with it; set it aside in her sister’s room so that it could be returned to her room once it was clean, set it aside in that same room so that it could go somewhere else (the Little People and the Brio train set are getting set aside for the next generation but the tyranny of Barbie has come to an end!) and then the inevitable trash and recycling. She filled both bins.
Problem is her sister is due home from school soon. She probably would like a place to sleep and access to her belongings.
So all weekend we spent working upstairs. I spent some time tidying up my own room and guiding her. She did the majority of the work. She hit the wall of exhaustion eventually. She said to me when we finally retired to the couch at the end of a very long day, “Is this what you feel like all the time?” and I gave her an honest answer. How could I not?
I hit that same wall the next day while we finished the clearing and began the cleaning. I was planning on sitting down once her bedroom floor was mopped and drying but only made it through four loads of laundry washed and hung, cookie pick up for scouts and the beginning of the Slaying of the Dust Mammoths. The final vacuuming and mopping had to wait.
I almost fell over I was so dizzy. Told Sofie I was going downstairs and literally fell onto the couch. It took a few minutes for the room to stop spinning and then I went into a coma for two solid hours. I never nap like that anymore. Then again, I also haven’t been doing this much up all by myself until now for quite some time.
A good thing about being the only adult in the house is that I can tell the kid to make her own supper out of what’s in the fridge and she’ll do it if she wants to eat.
She could have had pork roast but chose roasted potatoes and a salad. Said she was going vegetarian for the day. When there’s five or four people to feed it’s not really possible to survive an entire day on leftovers. There aren’t that many. With just two we are able to get three meals out of a deep dish sausage and mushroom pizza.
After my epic nap and a half hour laying on the couch waking up, we tackled the rest of the room. Vacuumed from top to bottom, floor mopped for the first time in quite a while. All linens and curtains washed, line dried in gale force winds at 26°. She carried things in from the staging area in her sister’s room and the hallway. It was a surprisingly little amount. I’d say she probably purged about two-thirds of what was in that room.
So now it’s down to me to go through the detritus that has been discarded and do one of three things with it. Set aside somewhere safe and save for the next generation, send back out into the Great Material Continuum, or recycle or chuck.
It all comes back to me as the only adult in the house. But at least I can get these sorts of projects underway for the eventual greater good (how long has that white bin of stuffed animals been in the hallway under the laundry chute? And the doll bunk bed waiting for a clear space under the window and holding up plants?) and now that her room is clean, it’s been made very clear that it needs to stay that way.
I’m so very proud of her. She’s done s a great job. She has taken control of her universe and made it what she wants.
Just like I’m trying to do with mine.
I think I just had my first moment of actually feeling like an adult.
#funtimes
