I decided to start spring cleaning over the weekend, not because I’m that much ahead of the game, but because it will really take me until summer to finish, despite living in a tiny abode. I am going to go methodically, room by room, taking as many weekends as necessary to complete the cleaning. I decided to start in the living room, and I knew exactly what I would start with: the stickers on the front door window.
I had a lot of ideas about parenting before I had kids and I was just a little bit judgmental. If I saw a lady yelling at her kids in the store, I’d think, “Good grief lady, get a grip, and learn how to control your kids!” Now I think, “Keep on keeping on, sister, you only got an hour until nap time.” There are so many things that I’ve done (and said) as a parent that I swore I’d never do, too many to count.
So if someone would have told me that I would sit and watch my two-year-old affix stickers to my front door window, I would not have believed it, but sit and watch I did. Colin was a couple of weeks old and would only sleep in the Moby wrap or if I held him. The older boys were supposed to be putting the stickers on their Halloween buckets but Sully decided he’d rather put them on the front door window. Colin had fallen asleep in my arms and I whispered to Sully to please stop and put the stickers on the bucket instead. He continued to put them on the window. Now, I could have tried putting the baby down, but he most certainly would have woken up. I could have gotten out of the chair and taken away the stickers, but, without a doubt, Sully would have thrown a fit and woken the baby. So I sat and watched him stick those stickers on the window while the baby slept peacefully in my arms, and for those fifteen minutes, we were all deliriously happy.
That was almost five months ago and I’ve finally gotten around to scraping off those Halloween stickers. Of course, I still believe children should be taught to respect property and not to simply do as they please. But when I think back on those fifteen minutes of glorious silence, the nearly five months I’ve been looking at those stickers on the window, and the ten minutes of hard labor it took to scrape them off, I come to only one conclusion: Yep. Totally worth it.