Crisis Clean

Last month, when the weather was still warm and winter was oh so far away, I somewhat rashly volunteered to hold cold weather homeschool park days at my house, not realizing that my regrettable impulse toward hospitality meant that I would have to excavate our basement playroom.  You see, normally, we manage to use that room as is - the neighborhood kids are used to the flotsam and jetsam that ends up down there, and they are all old enough not to get hurt by the shop vac, say, that somehow ended up next to the exercise bike or by the piles of construction materials that Larry pulled out of the basement (guest room) shower because his sister was coming to visit.

Look, I never said I liked living this way, okay?

But park day - that meant numerous kids, ages 3 and up, visiting our far-from-childproofed basement playroom.  Aside from the public humiliation I'd experience should I leave everything where it was, there was also the possibility of liability lawsuits to consider.  So Friday morning the kids and I got to work.

Quite frankly, it was a horrendous experience - I mean, who knew there could be that many shards of plastic Easter eggs embedded in any one carpet?  And the pencils! Apparently, the basement is where all the pencils go to hide the minute the kids sit down to do any schoolwork. But the girls worked hard, putting away stray game pieces (SO MANY GAME PIECES), fitting all the games into the cabinet so that it would actually close (this is a Tetris-like puzzle, actually, that is quite difficult to solve), and neatening the bookshelves so that they didn't look as if a tornado had just hit them.

Brian did himself proud, also, hauling the 2x4's and panels of extra insulation and drywall back into the basement shower (shut up), while David hustled around, moving all sorts of myriad painting supplies and the shop vac I didn't even know we owned back into the laundry room whence they came. In the meantime, I labored over piles (PILES) of Larry's books which had been displaced from a bookshelf I gave to Anna months ago; I thought I had already managed to find homes for all of them, but apparently I was living a lie.

People, my basement looks so good right now.  And no one got hurt last Friday, when everyone showed up to play.  And, because I had to clean up and childproof the main floor for any babies who might be at park day, my house is almost all ready for Bunko tomorrow night.  I call that a win-win-win scenario.

But this question lingers in my brain - do any of you have to work this hard just to have people over? Or are we just hopeless slobs, as I have theorized before?