HIS POV:
As anyone may notice that tries to follow our "blog", we aren't very good at keeping it up. As a matter of fact when I came on to write this one I noticed the last published one came from December 2015 and here we are four months later. Some of this reason is because neither one of us are much of writers, but also because we rarely get time to just sit down and type any thoughts out even if we made it our first priority. Don't get me wrong, though, just because I say typing a blog isn't our first priority, cleaning our house isn't either.
If you visited us on a normal day when we weren't expecting you (because lets face it, if we expect you then you will be treated to a slightly cleaner house) then you would be faced with an obstacle of toys, clothes, shoes, papers and, to be brutally honest, food. Andrea and I were never the cleanest people. That isn't to say that I haven't had my moments in life. As a young boy I was verging on OCD. Every toy and every item in our house when I was a toddler had a specific place and it had to be there or I would correct you. As I grew, though, I adapted a more of a loose idea of the concept of clean. I still had my moments like the night as a teenager late one night from working at Wal-Mart and just deciding that my parent's kitchen was a mess when I went to make a late dinner. I cleaned all the dishes and wiped down all the counters. Over all, though, I learned not to stress the mess.
As I dated Andrea I learned quickly from her and her family that Andrea never had quite the issue I had ever had making a mess. She didn't just tolerate it, she embraced it. After we got engaged she started stating she wouldn't be able to go out because she was going to clean. I would ask her why all of a sudden she felt the urge to clean. Her reply was something to the effect that she knew how good her mom did cleaning up and if she and I were going to have a family then she wanted to be able to keep our house clean like her mother did. At this point I reassured her that I wasn't marrying her so I could have a maid and even if she started cleaning then, she wasn't going to change who she was and she wasn't going to fool me. I knew by marrying her that I would have to expect a little bit of a mess. Not because she wouldn't be able to recognize a mess, but because she had a high tolerance for what would be allowed prior to "freaking out" about it.
Well as expected, after we got married we had a slight (a relative term to what we endure now) mess in our house but we both owned it and we both shared the chores as we both had day jobs so that neither of us had more of an excuse to do less. Then more time went by and we started adding to our family and Andrea became a stay-at-home mom. She thought when staying home she would be able to keep up with the housework. She had underestimated how much more messy the children could be than she and I were as just the two of us.
The mess the kids have added to our own us definitely spilled past our own tolerances, but we have learned to accept it. We hit spurts of trying our best to keep up with the cleaning. As a matter of fact, without knowing what I was doing, Andrea started having the kids clean up a couple paragraphs back. Our tolerance for a mess has come from our own "messy" lifestyles prior to the addition of children, but has grown because we have decided just living with the children has been more important than cleaning all the time.
We have never painted or repaired a wall because we know life happens and if we took the time to paint our walls than maybe our tolerance would lower to the point that a simple swipe of a dirty hand on the wall would no longer just be a child keeping their balance but now it would feel like a slight against our hard work. Our children do take pride in their cleaning when they do it. Right now Amie is cleaning a window and doing all she can to get to the parts she can't reach naturally and asking how good it looks.
So yes we live in a mess, but I like that there is proof we live here. I love that when I come home I can see evidence of what my family has done when I have been at work, whether it be cleaning or painting pictures; I can see evidence when I get home. Sure there are moments of exhaustion when something gets broken because it got knocked to the ground and got lost in the ground mess and stepped on. Or there are the times important papers get lost and we can spend hours looking for the sheet of paper. But overall we have spent more time as a family enjoying each others company without stressing over the little things, like shoes being put away.
