“What’s the matter with Mom,” Jake whispered to Joey.

“I dunno,” Joey whispered back, “She looks mad. I think you should ask…”

Thankfully, Jake just let it go and moved on to making a mess elsewhere. I continued doing what I was doing, knowing it was crazy, wasteful and only a temporary fix to an irritating problem.

In my last post, I told you how I wasted spent my first kid free weekend in two years.  That wasn’t totally true.  It’s been more like five years, and this was the first time I’ve been away from my daughter overnight (ever), and it was the first time I’ve been away from the boys since I gave birth and spent two nights in the hospital two years ago with Cecilia.

I should have sipped wine all day. I should have read books.  I should have taken a nap.  Instead I cleaned my entire house top to bottom just to have it wrecked 64 minutes after I finished cleaning when the kids came home.

I did expect that at the first meal I’d be cleaning floors and walls again, I did expect that the laundry would pile up in a day, and that I’d be tripping over toys within hours, but it was still sad to see all my hard work go up in flames…practically.  So when I caught my oldest, who is now six and totally knows better, wiping his face on one of my couch pillows, I lost it.

First, I just stood there silently staring at him.  My left eyelid began to twitch.  I said nothing, grabbed a roll of paper towels and did this:

I wrapped the whole couch in paper towels and told the kids that was now the only couch upstairs they were allowed to sit on.  I told them to do whatever they wanted to it, cause it was their couch alone and I didn’t care anymore.

This is when their whispering started, they went downstairs and onto making the next mess.

And you know what? It worked. Kind of…

Preliminary forensics suggest Jake was the one who rubbed a jelly hand across the couch, and when questioned he stated “You told me to use a paper towel.”

I had no argument there.

You know what?  Instead of screaming and yelling, which is really just a waste of energy on my part, I did this and now I feel much better.

Refreshed even.

And don’t worry, I even kept all but three of the paper towels to use to clean the windows and wipe the floor in the future.

So what do you think?  Am I alone in my craziness here or have you ever done something similar?  Leave me a comment and tell me what you think!  And while you’re here, please clicky-click on the banner below to cast an automatic vote for me on Top Mommy Blogs (just one click is all it takes!):