Rituals: Cleaning

This week's theme is ... RITUALS. This could be anything - morning rituals, how you eat a burrito, the most efficient way you drive home. We all have them, usually without realizing.

The ritual I'm going to share with you today is: cleaning.

So exciting, I know! I had a very hard time coming up with the ritual to share (even though this week's theme was my idea ... yeah, that was so smart of me). But cleaning is something everyone has to do, and I'll bet we all go about it differently. Some people set a day every week to clean. Some people hide things in closets or shove piles of stuff along the walls until the sheer lack of floor space FORCES them to clean (this is me a lot of times).  Some people pick up as they go because they can't stand a messy house (I envy these people!). Some people hire a cleaning person (I envy these people too!).

My husband and I have agreed that he does the dishes and I do the laundry. I absolutely hate doing the dishes, and he hates doing laundry so it worked out great. Except I'm a big slacker and we tend to have overflowing laundry bins and run out of clean pants. But as far as rituals go, here's what we do when it's time to really get down to clean:

1. Start with the easy stuff - Generally, hubs works on the dishes while I start a load of laundry. I know some people work on the hard stuff first, but for cleaning the hard stuff (steam cleaning the floors, wiping down counters, etc.) is usually buried under piles of stuff.
2. We stick together - Working together makes it not such a lonely task. And we can make sure one of us doesn't find his/her way to the couch or computer.
3. We blast the Pandora music - Everything is better when you're rocking out.
4. We take a burrito break - Cleaning really works up an appetite, and generally the solution for a hungry hungry housekeeper is a California burrito from our local Mexican food joint.
5. We tackle one area at a time - It's more satisfying to get one room nice and clean than working on every room at once, thus only making it slightly cleaner everywhere. This is easier said than done because I get distracted easy.
6. We reward ourselves with a movie - Hubs tends to fizzle long before I do, and he often tries to get me to take a break and watch a movie. So I usually say that once we're finished, the movie can be our reward.

Do you do it differently? It's a rare day that we actually clean our place from top to bottom, and we generally only get a little bit done. Perhaps just getting rid of all our junk would help!

Sorry again that this post is a bit late. I hope you all had a fabulous Valentine's Day (our at-home fondue was super delicious!).