I know what you're thinking.
You're thinking, put down that spray bottle, Suburban. Nobody cleans the house for a kid home for spring break.
But I'm not doing it for him.
I know as well as you do that he has probably already invited a dozen other 19-year-old boys to come over and spill Chipotle all over the furniture in the basement.
I'm doing it to send a message. And that message is this: Things are different.
We eat from plates now. Sometimes even in the kitchen. Dirty laundry goes IN the laundry basket. It's something new we're trying. Clean laundry goes somewhere else. We're still working on it. But you probably have noticed that entire sections of floor are almost shoe free. And the kitchen countertops? We know now that we have them.
See how we live now?
It's not 100 percent true. Or any percent, if you want to get all technical. But my theory is this: We have an opportunity to reset the bar as to what constitutes an acceptable level of household disorder. It's a fresh start. Fresh-ish.
Because it's harder to spill the contents of an overstuffed burrito onto a floor that has been freshly vacuumed. And no one wants to be the first to put a half-eaten plate of food onto a freshly-cleaned kitchen counter. A teenager who walks into a house where he can see his reflection in every solid surface is going to hesitate before he dumps the unwashed contents of his suitcase onto the floor. [EDITOR'S NOTE: We have since learned that this is actually not true.]
Before you know it, a couch that doesn't crunch when you sit on it will start to seem normal. We lived like that once. I'm pretty sure. It's possible I am thinking of some other family.
For more inspiration in a spray bottle, check out SK on Queen Latifah today.
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