I was recently sharing with a friend various situations that occur in a typical day here in the Siedschlag family. We had a good laugh over some of the crazy actions and interactions that take place in our home, although I am not always laughing at the time! Taking my dear friend's suggestion, I am going to share them with you so you, too, can laugh with us at some of our "calamities"!
Let me take you on a brief tour of our home first. You won't know all the rooms, specifically, but you will have a better feel for how our home functions and what one may find when entering our house. When you walk in, there is a small entry way with the formal dining room immediately to your left, only we utilize this room as an office and a "quiet get-away" room. On the desk, you will see stacks of papers waiting to be filed next to our computer. This room always looks the cleanest! The living room and the kitchen, just on the other side of the wall, is where much of the action throughout the day takes place. Upstairs there is a decent sized game room where we keep most of the toys and a small library of books. Our bedroom is utilized for more than just snoozing. It is also a room for "trampolining", wrestling with Dad, watching movies on a very small TV, and unwinding at the end of the day. We also have a pretty large back yard surrounded by "neighbor fences" which allow everyone to see what everyone else is doing in their yards! Actually, I believe this is meant to encourage community.
I do shampoo and vaccuum the carpets once a week. I vaccuum the upholstry once a month. I mop the kitchen floor once a week and clean the whole kitchen using Mr Clean with Febreeze disinfectant once a day. I wipe down the fridge, microwave, and toaster oven to show off a little shine, even if only for ten minutes! I wipe the table with a wet rag and then go over it again with Orange Glo wood polish. If I am feeling energetic, I will even use a little Orange Glo on the coffee table and book shelves. Once in a blue moon, not because it rarely needs it, but because within less than an hour one would never know I did anything, I will take some Windex to the patio door. It's amazing how much more light comes in when it's clean! ;-) Actually, I have a daily cleaning schedule so as not to become too overwhelmed:
-Mondays, I clean the floors downstairs.
-Tuesdays, I attempt to get around ten loads of laundry done.
- Wednesdays, the upstairs floors get done along with cleaning the bathrooms.
-I originally set aside Thursdays for "small" projects like filing. Usually, Thursday becomes the day I finish whatever I haven't been able to get done thus far.
-Friday evenings we host a game night, so I made Fridays "mopping days".
One would think with this routine, our house must look close to emaculate most of the time. Not so. There are days you would walk in to our home and never know that a a dish rag or broom even exists in our household. Toys from upstairs that have been dragged downstairs, cups of water on the coffee table and TV stand, containers of Goldfish crackers on the floor, and a few more piles of "stuff" that need to be "filed", or maybe tossed are all common visuals that one would experience while taking a small tour of our home. Uncooked spaghetti noodles on the floor, rolled oats on the carpet, water on the kitchen floor, fruit smeared across the kitchen table, mud tracked in from outside, a dirty pull-up missing from someone's bottom, chocolate chip cookie smeared on places other than the face, dumped spices in the sink, lotion and soap pumped out into the toilet and upset plants are, also, possibilities of what one would have found in the recent past. We have since been able to remedy some of these challenges. I will share some of these stories and what we did to "fix" the problem with you. I truly hope that the following stories will encourage you if you have a child with autism or at the very least make you laugh!
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