A Clean House

When my house is completely clean, I feel _________.

How would you answer that question?

Sometimes there are days when I just don't feel like doing housework. I just want to watch Team Umizoomi with the kids, bake cookies, play with Barbies or Legos, read a story I've read 100 times to them...anything besides what I should take time to do each day. I don't want to do the daily chores that are never ending. While I realize it's just part of being an adult (and, dare I say, especially part of being a stay-at-home mom), I find that I am almost childlike on occasion, in complete protest of cleaning my room!

But what I have found to be overwhelmingly true is how I feel when I've done what I should do. When the house is just as it should be, and I look around to see everything in its place...

...like a toy-free, shoe-free, randompaper-free living room.












Or a bedroom with no laundry baskets, no clothes on the floor, no stacks of papers to go through.













Or even a dining room table filled with a few loads of folded laundry on its way to be put away.
















When the dishes are done, when I've planned ahead for dinner, when the bathrooms have clean toilets and there are no Hello Kitty hair ties lying in the sink...I feel many things.

I feel proud that I'm taking care of my home.

I feel accomplished because I did my part.

I feel happy because I like the way my house looks.



But mostly, I'd say I feel at peace. And when I feel at peace about my home, it's a great feeling. I'd guess this feeling comes from doing something that is intrinsic to a woman. Perhaps that sounds unliberated, and I'm certainly not saying a man shouldn't help out. But when Proverbs 31 says, "She watches over the affairs of her household and does not eat the bread of idleness," it means to me that we are more prone to feel the need to have our homes in order. No matter if a woman works outside of the home or not, no wonder she must feel a sense of peace about her home when she's worked hard to keep it just as it should be.

Peace.

That's a feeling I need daily. And somehow I need to remind myself of that peaceful feeling when all I want to do is do nothing.