Keeping Up Appearances

We are having a small, early First Birthday (!) Party for Kenny this Sunday.   His birthday is really next Saturday, but my parents are committed to an out-of-town wedding, and celebrating Baby’s First Birthday (!) without one set of grandparents would be like celebrating your wedding anniversary solo  while your spouse was out playing golf.   (Or something like that.)  

So facts being as they are, I began a tornado of housecleaning today, in preparation for Casey’s parents’ arrival this evening.   No matter that there is a hurricane outside our window,  with at least one foot waves crashing over our bulkhead (very unusual, even for a stormy day) and bringing an inevitable load of debris into our yard, a dog that absolutely will not go out and do his business in this monsoon and is instead playing the role of Howling Wolf for the morning, and a baby that does not like his playpen anymore, now that Mommy is doing that funny waltz with the vacuum cleaner and not letting him out to chase it  along.

I crawled on my hands and knees and pulled the spider webs out from under the couch, polished the stainless steel appliances and scrubbed the guest bathtub.   Kenny finally decided that enough was enough, and he asked me politely to at least put him down for a nap if I was going to ignore him in my cleaning frenzy.   After he fell asleep, and my frantic pace continued with painting over the scuff marks on the walls, I started musing over what I was doing.   Aside from the obvious fact that, yes, I need to clean the house every week so that there is not mold and germs and allergenic dog hairs polluting up the place, and for the simple reason that I enjoy a clean house, and I believe that Casey deserves to come home to one, what exactly was I out to prove with my microscopic analysis of my interior?   Was I really thinking that my in-laws, who visit here often, and certainly know what our house looks like both clean and dirty, would arrive with a white-glove inspection?   Was I worried that one of the party-goers on Sunday would assess my abilities as wife and mother on the sole matter of whether or not there were finger prints on the pergo?   Was I secretly afraid that one of the other kids would drop a Cheerio, which would roll under the couch, prompting a Mommy to get down on her knees to retrieve it and see the dust bunnies under there?  

Or am I falling into the inevitable trap of treating Mommyhood as a competitive sport?   “See, my kid lives in a squeeky-clean house so I must be a Mommy that has it all together.”   That’s even worse than those smug, insinuating comments that other Moms drive me crazy with, like, “Oh,  poor little Jerry just has so many activities because he’s so good at so many things and we hate to keep him from  living up to his potential!”   Why do we do this to ourselves?   How do you find the balance between doing the best you can with what you’ve got, and going crazy trying to be perfect?

While  Kenny was asleep, Casey came home and now the two of them are playing happily downstairs, amidst the very clean, though still not-yet-mopped house.   Their laughter is contagious.   I need to go join them.   I declare the rest of the day a playday!

But first, one more thing: I have neglected to mention in any of my posts this week about the very unusual reaction Kenny has been having to bathtime.   (“Very Unusual” to be translated as “Please please PLEASE don’t put me in there, Mommy don’t you love me anymore, I hate baths, they are too scary!!!!”)   Last night I actually put on a swimsuit and got into the tub with him.   He was fine after a few minutes of clinging to my neck.   This is the kid who used to crawl on his own to the bathroom as soon as I said, “bathtime!”   I have no idea what happened.   Maybe the little rubber elephant I put over the spout to keep him from cracking open his head if he fell forward?   Maybe he didn’t like the way he was scrub-a-dubbed at some point last week and resolved to go on bath-stike?   Has this happened to anyone else?   I love baths as much as the next gal, but I don’t want to have to get in there everytime, just to get his little body clean.   Any ideas out there?