Keeping Up With Life & Cleaning Up My Act

I cleaned up my act with Zep Commercial® as part of a sponsored post for Socialstars. #TryZep

Super Mom’s Reusable Daily Guide To Cleaning – FREE PRINTABLE!

It’s no big secret that I’m not the best housekeeper on the planet. I have a really hard time balancing work, cooking fresh food, doing laundry for 5, and keeping up with all the other things that need to be done in the house to keep it nice and tidy. Therefore, at least 25 days of the month, my house looks like it threw up on itself. Most days, I can’t even walk into the babies’ room because of all the crap on the floor. Since I caved to the pressure of Kyle’s constant whining about having a TV in our room, even our bedroom isn’t a safe place. When I’m showering (yes, it does happen), the babies enjoy discovering long-lost-styrofoam then turning it into Styro-glitter. Styro-glitter that stays there until I find the time to vacuum at some point weeks later.

Just after we moved back to Florida, I was keeping on top of the house like it was my job. Because, well, it’s kinda one of my jobs. I developed this awesome system that just worked and kept me rolling for a couple months. You can download and print your own Guide To Cleaning out, cut it up and laminate with laminating sheets so that you have something to guide you into keeping your house clean and tidy all the time. Use dry erase markers to keep track so you don’t clean the toilet three times in the same day. It has happened.

So this great system helped the first couple months we lived here, then a terrible thing happened. I went on a super cool press trip to Universal Studios Orlando and I came back all fired up to work, but not all fired up to keep the house clean. My suitcase is still sitting in the middle of my bedroom floor and I’ve been home for over a week. The really sad part is that it’s empty and all it would take is for me to pick it up and put it in my closet. I had made it a habit to clean the kitchen before giving the babies a bath and that included the sink, the stove top, and the sinks. Lately? It’s not happening. I noticed last week that my counters were lookin’ pretty rough. and realized I hadn’t sprayed and wiped them in a few days. Gross.

I told the kids to take the sheets off of their beds last Sunday. The same sheets are on their beds now. Yuck! Two weeks ago on Sunday, I made Styles change his own sheets. When I went in his room to put laundry away on Tuesday, his bed had no sheets on it. Those clean sheets were on the floor and he had been sleeping on his mattress. Do I need to send him to reform school or is this normal behavior for a 13 year old boy? His excuse? “Those sheets don’t fit the bed!” Uh, yeah they do, Mr. Lazy! Give them a good quarter turn and they’ll fit just fine. I had to stand there and supervise while he put the sheets on the proper way. You’ll never guess what happened. They fit. I know, astounding, right?

World War Clean Your Room happened here this week. After Halloween came and went, I figured I would use candy to bribe the littles to keep their rooms clean. No go. They would rather forego candy than pick a measly 10 items up from the floor. I wasn’t sure if I should bang my head against a wall or stand there, beaming with pride at the fact that my kids didn’t love candy as much as the next kid. I did the next best thing. I got a trash bag from the kitchen and picked everything up from the floor, depositing it all safely inside my enormous plastic sack. The soundtrack was somewhere between being sprayed in the face with napalm and losing your first dog. The assailants were small but mighty and I suffered a right hook to the cheek and a few kicked shins before the battle was over.

It taught my kids exactly nothing other than mommy is a tyrant who will throw all your things away if you don’t clean your room. They certainly haven’t continued to clean their room since it happened, and I’m feeling totally at a loss. I work from home, I’m starting my own company, I have this blog, I cook from-scratch meals every day, we have a busy schedule with car pools that last two and a half hours in the afternoon, plus ballet and trying to find time to keep all of our underwear clean. That doesn’t include all the other houseworkey type things that are required of a person who doesn’t want to live like a pig, and unfortunately, a housekeeper isn’t really in the budget. I learned recently that a maid wouldn’t pick up, they would expect you to pick up for them, and they would only clean up for us. I can clean! That’s not even all that hard. I really just need someone to come pick this pigsty up for me on the regular.

It helps to have cleaning products that not only work, but don’t give you a massive headache after you use them. I’ve been using Zep Commercial as my go-to degreaser, and I love that I don’t have to scrub the mess out of my greasy sink drain, or really put any elbow grease into my cleaning. It’s hard enough dealing with life and all its messes on a daily basis, anything I can get that makes cleaning easier for me is my favorite thing. That means that Zep Commercial is my favorite thing. That @%!# Will Clean Anything. Seriously, it will. For instance, take a look at this disgusting sink drain of mine.

I don’t know it gets so grimy, we don’t dump grease down the sink because we operate on a septic system. Every time I lift my little sink crumb catcher I gag at the sight of the grime on this thing. It’s like a grease and grime convention in my sink. I really think they should find a new venue.

Do you ever think of wiping down your door knobs? I started doing it obsessively when we moved then stopped, and no sooner had I stopped, nearly everyone in the house got sick. I’m back to it now, but I love Zep Commercial’s Quick Clean Disinfectant. It kills most viruses with lightning speed, which means I have just enough time to spray the door knobs down before the kids touch one again.

I’m never going to be a professional house cleaner, but if I was, I would use Zep Commercial’s line of cleaning products on my clients homes. In the meantime, I’m going to pretend that I know what I’m doing and keep following my handy dandy little daily cleaning guide so that my house stays germ-free during cold and flu season, and so that the next time the parental units show up unannounced, I’ll be ready.