Vacuuming. Oh, the joy!

Our entire house is carpeted in a light shade of beige. In fact, when we moved in, even the bathrooms were carpeted. While that may be just dandy for the previous residents, a nearly-retired couple whose children have long since moved away, it's not exactly practical for a family of eight, six of whom are ten years old and younger.

We took out the carpets in the bathrooms within a matter of days. The plan was to do the same in the kitchen, until we lifted it up and saw the disgusting linoleum underneath it. You know it's bad if the carpet suddenly seems like a great idea! A kitchen remodel has been on our to-do list for a couple of years, so we can't replace it yet. But we can't remodel the kitchen until we fix the foundation, which is a ways off, so here we sit in a carpeted kitchen.

With the amount of food small children eat, and the glee with which they fling it in many directions, you can imagine what the floor looks like at the end of the day! We have a good vacuum, a nice HEAVY vacuum, that does a great job of cleaning up. Whether it's the soggy Cheerios that Levi is slinging across the room, the Chicken Tarragon noodles that Aspen is busy shoving under her chair so she doesn't have to eat them, the crumbs under the table from when Jaden hid and ate the rest of the Chips Ahoy, or even the sugary, sticky powder that's everywhere because Kendra thought that Gatorade tasted better before you add water, my vacuum cleans it all. And oh, you haven't seen what a vacuum can do until you've used it to clean up the twenty pounds of flour that your children have used to turn the kitchen floor into a sandbox complete with shovels, pails, and a Tonka dump truck.

It's been a challenge, though, to get the kids to run the vacuum themselves. Andrew is ten, and perfectly capable of operating it. However, if you ask him, it may as well be hiking the Gobi desert. Once he realizes that the only way to get Lego Star Wars time is to hike that desert, he does a pretty good job. Jaden is eight, and while he misses a few areas, he can still manage a pretty decent job, once he's done rolling around the floor in agony because you've demanded such a hard task.

Kendra and Aspen can't quite vacuum, mostly because it's big and heavy and they don't have the strength to push it around. They're quite content to be the reason FOR the vacuuming instead. Kendra has an affinity for sweet, powdery things; if she thinks I have too much time on my hands, she is happy to provide additional tasks for me such as cleaning up the spilled hot cocoa packets, powdered sugar, the aforementioned Gatorade, or even chocolate pudding mix. Aspen will help Kendra eat the mixes, but she doesn't usually get them out on her own. Her taste runs more to frosting, cookies, dry cereal, marshmallows if she can find them, and candy. Of course, being the good big sisters that they are, they are diligently instilling in Levi the "sneak, eat, and run" skills they've spent so much time acquiring. Can't find Levi? Find his sisters, because he knows if he follows them around he'll eventually get food.

(And yes, to head off your questions, I do feed my children. On a regular basis. They even get dessert and are not sweets-deprived. Of course, if you ask THEM, you will probably get a different answer.)

To alleviate the constant work of getting out the vacuum, filling it with water, dragging it around the house, emptying the water container, and putting it back away--only to need it again 4.57 minutes later--Jeff found a lightweight, portable vacuum. It's pretty much a Dustbuster, with a long handle and a floor attachment. Aspen was thrilled. to. pieces. to bring home her vacuum. It had to be hers, she explained, because she could pick it up and push it around and it was just three-year-old size. She vacuumed everything she could find the first day it was here. All of the other kids wanted to try it too, because they couldn't let Aspen have all the fun, so each took a turn pushing the vacuum around.

Silly me, I actually thought for a few minutes that my floor might be cleaner because now my kids had a vacuum they liked to use. What's the downside to that, you may ask?

Aspen did such a good job of cleaning the kitchen floor that she didn't have anything left to vacuum. She didn't want to take it to another room, since she can't touch the plug by herself.

So she did what any self-respecting three-year-old would do. She took it upon herself to make sure that she would have plenty of things to vacuum up off the floor. Then she made sure that Kendra would have plenty of things to vacuum. And Andrew...and Jaden...and then out came the words I thought I'd never utter in my lifetime:

"Stop vacuuming! You are not allowed to vacuum the kitchen again today!"