Kitchen Floor

Tuesdays and Thursdays, Cole goes to daycare. And although I'm not a neat person by any stretch of the imagination, sometimes the chaos of my house catches up to me and a Tuesday or Thursday seems like a perfect opportunity to play catch-up on housework.

So, Amelia by my side, I decided to mop my kitchen floor.  Except that I have yet to find a mop I like.  So I do what my mother used to do.  I get a bowl of cleaning solution and I crouch down with a sponge in hand and I scoot square by square across the kitchen floor, methodically scrubbing and scouring.  This sounds like a tedious and difficult job, doesn't it? Well, I guess that's why I do it so infrequently.

I took all the chairs out of the kitchen, and put the exersaucer in the living room.  I put Amelia in the living room.  I took a big bowl from the cupboard and filled it with the all-natural thyme-and-oregano cleaning detergent and added some warm water.  I did a quick once over with the broom. Amelia crawled into the room and tried to eat the pile of crumbs.  I put her back in the living room.

I got a fresh sponge with a heavy-duty scouring pad on the opposite side and I set to work. My system is to move the bowl systematically as an indicator of which row of tiles I've already cleaned.  As the glass bowl slides along the tiles, it makes a special kind of clanging sound.  Amelia found this very intruging.  She came in to investigate and began to follow the bowl.  So I had to slowly rotate the bowl around myself to keep it away from her.  Then she lost interest and decided to play with the electrical power bar. 

I tried to put her in the exersaucer.  She protested.  I set her on the floor again and gave her my car keys.  She played happily as I scoured the baseboards and wondered what this caked-on brown stuff was.  I found gobs of black food colouring (remnants of Cole's fire truck birthday cake)  and lots of red lentils (Cole's indoor "sand" box). Then the clunking of the keys stopped and I turned and Amelia was at the power bar again.  I moved her and gave her the keys back.  The clanging continued so I thought we were good until I realized she'd brought the keys to the power bar this time.

I moved her again.  Then she came over to investigate the bowl of detergent again. And on and on went the dance. I moved Amelia; then I scrubbed; then I moved Amelia; then I scrubbed.  I was finally nearing the last part of my scouring and I paused from my work as I noticed a peculiar pause in activity. 

Amelia was sitting in the middle of my pristine floor, smiling giddily through a soother, a pool of curdled spit up encircled her bum like a halo.