{Dirty} Little Secret

This morning my Girls were dancing in the kitchen to the tunes coming from my iPod playlist. I'd no sooner turned the music on (to get me motivated to do some serious cleaning) when they came running into the kitchen to dance. I stood watching them groove together to the beat for a few moments before

they turned to me and demanded that I join them. I hesitated as I looked around...

and saw this. Dirty dishes on the counter, some from breakfast, others from the night before. The butter dish still out from buttering

the Girls' pancakes. Pans on the stove needing cleaning, clean pans on the microwave to be put away, marshmallows and Rice Krispies for

the Rice Krispie treats I planned on making for a BBQ we were attending later in the afternoon. My yoga bag, Barbies strewn

across the floor, clean laundry in the chair, dirty laundry on the floor, totes of too-small clothes that have not moved since April. And the

bar counter, well let's just say the countertop itself hasn't seen the light of day since 2009. Layers get unearthed but inevitably new items form a replacement layer. It is my ultimate dumping grounds. The scraps of paper littering the floor are from a craft project for the summer Sunday school program at church that I have been putting together. They were cut using a paper cutter that is somewhere near the bottom of all those layers of clutter. The dining room table still had breakfast dishes on it, a dirty bib, a coloring book and a bubble wand. While I am not, and have never claimed to be, the greatest housekeeper I do maintain a level of cleanliness and on this particular day the state of my entire house fell way short of that standard. Since I am airing my dirty little secret here in public I may as well be completely honest and state the plain fact that on any particular day in the past month or so, you could have shown up at my house unannounced and it probably would've looked quite similar to these pictures. I can't seem to keep up with all the household chores these days and maybe it is because I choose to...

dance. I choose to be Mom over maid. I choose the fleeting moments when the faces of my Girls are lit up gleefully as I grab their sweet little hands

and become part of the circle. It is not a difficult choice. They don't care about the clutter. They won't cherish me when they are older because I kept an immaculate house during their childhood. So today we dance. We smile and laugh. We create memories. As for the mess, it will still be there tomorrow...and the day after.