Image credit: Photo by k a t m Licensed under Creative Commons

I sort of want to write a post today, but I sort of want to curl up under a blanket and watch the leaves fall more. Of course, I say that, all romantic, with this great image of myself curled up with a cup of tea and a cat on my lap, but have you seen my house today? No. Thank goodness, none of you have. Nor have you smelled it.

Do you have kids? Do you know what a house looks like when they've been home for the weekend, generating dirty lunch dishes and taking stuff out of the Goodwill box to play with and leaving army men on the floor for people to step on? (Note to self: e-mail son's teacher to ask if he's limping.) A better mother and woman than I would put the kids and the husband to work cleaning up their own messes, but let's not get into that. Really, let's not. Well, ok, let's, but only if I don't have to hear about how you'd do it better.

In this house, your mother does live here and she's way more worried about contracting salmonella and falling to her death tripping over Legos than you are. So, yes, I could employ "natural consequences," leaving the dishes for someone else to do, until they reach up — in a stinking, fetid pile — to the ceiling, but then I have to live with a mountain of putrid dishes (and with the years of therapy it will take to bring me out of a state of catatonia when I find them covered with roaches) while my family cleverly fills the kitchen with discarded paper plates instead. (And yes, my husband has actually gone out to the store and purchased paper plates. You think I haven't tried?)

I could employ those old mothering standbys of nagging and punishing, rounding up family members and standing over them, poking them with the underwire of the bra that's currently on the kitchen floor until the dishes are done. (How did a bra get on the kitchen floor? Excellent question. It is mine and believe me I wasn't doing anything sexy in the kitchen with it. Somehow the dirty laundry migrated there this weekend. Yes, it really did. I don't know.)

I could ask for help, appeal to my family's better nature, institute a sticker chart or any number of other things (and don't think I haven't from time to time), but you want to know the truth? All of those things — the consequences, the nagging, the poking with bra underwire, the yelling, the endless sticker charts — take way too much energy. There are three people in the house who are happy to live in squalor and one who can't rest easy looking past the ping pong paddles on the sofa and the carrots and ranch dressing still on the table from last night's snack, who can't bring herself to kick the sleeping cat off the quilt that's currently on the floor and who can't quite enjoy drinking tea from a paper cup while looking at the leaves.

So that one person either needs to learn to look past the mess (and buy a noseclip to block out the smell of, whatever that smell is...) or she needs to get up and do the damn dishes. If I'm lucky, I can finish it all 5 minutes before my daughter comes home from school. And I did manage to get a blog post out of it. Thank goodness the glow of this computer screen blocks out that... Um, ew... Did someone actually leave a snotty tissue in the middle of the living room floor? I have to go clean that up.