A Clean House...sort of?

So about a week ago, I stayed home from work, my in-laws (my favorite in-laws) were coming into town to attend Betsy's 40 under 40 reception and she seemed a little stressed about the state of home and let me tell you, I HATE to clean! Worse than that, I hate to dust. It seems so easy and there are way worse things to do (IE: bathrooms). Now, I had the opportunity to clean WITH Betsy the night before, but I thought it would be more appropriate and maybe the right thing to do it the next day while everyone was out, because everything is so much easier when the girls are at my mom's or daycare.

I made the decision to do it, still not sure why. I put on some great music, play it loud, kick the dogs outside and go. I can tell you that being married to Betsy for these past 10 years, I know what and where she looks when someone else cleans the house. This can be an extreme advantage or disadvantage. For example, I vacuumed for her in our bedroom and thought I did a pretty darn good job. She comes home and the first thing she does is compliment me on how nice everything looked, but then she asks if I did "the carpet test?" What the heck? So she proceeds to get on her knees and starts to pull on the carpet and of course begins to pull up dog hair as if I never vacuumed. Lesson learned. I can tell you that I do not do the "carpet test" to this day, but I am better at vacuuming.

So I am cleaning the house. Now here's the kicker, now that I have spent my entire day off cleaning the house preparing it for in-laws, and my VERY first thought was..."these girls will get home and mess this house up!" One of the things that I truly appreciate about Betsy is that she can keep things pretty cleaned up for a little bit, but when she starts to let go, what a domino effect because when she gets messy, it is like a green light to stop picking up and then we all start to get messy. I remember when we were dating and I would walk into her room and there was no floor, just a pile of clothes everywhere.

I like a clean house as much as the next person, but man, where is the maid service?