Note to Self

Dear Self,
When you have the opportunity to clean the kitchen and straighten up the house after the kids have gone to bed, DO IT!!!!  Should you not take that opportunity and procrastinate, it will come back to bite you in the behind. 

When you are tired from a long day of mothering, cooking, cleaning, and wife-ing, and you really don't want to clean, remember the morning of Saturday, November 13th.  On that morning, you thought you were going to have a relaxing Saturday morning with your family-complete with clean diapers and new outfits, warm coffee and breakfast, then a cleaning session during Jude's morning nap- until 9am when the phone rang and a local realtor wanted to show your house. 

For the next hour and a half, you ran around the house like a crazed mad woman on crack (complete with appropriately crazy hair and nonmatching, ill-fitting PJs) cleaning the house from top to bottom while tripping over your children and husband in an attempt to make your humble abode presentable enough to make someone want to buy it.

And when the people showed up EARLY to see your house, you were still sans make-up and sane hair (although you did manage to change your clothes into something one would not be tempted to enter you into http://www.peopleofwalmart.com/ for wearing) with a child on your hip and one on your leg. And I feel that I should remind you that during all of this, your husband was helping tremendously with kids, chores, and cleaning!  If he wasn't there, you just would have been up a creek, an even stronger case for my message to you.

Even though it is normally a stressful hour of cleaning, straightening, and packing up children before a house showing, if you keep your house neat and somewhat clean, you just might leave your house on time, with all children in outfits that match and shoes on, sufficiently packed diaper bag, tamed hair, and maybe even some make-up applied to that flushed face of yours.

If not, well, you just have fun flying around like your pants are on fire~unless you are wearing corduroys in which case your pants probably will catch on fire from the excessive amounts of friction caused by running around the house.  Then I will remind you how I told you so.