NOTHING SAYS CLEAN LIKE CLEAN CLEAN

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So this week I learned a very important lesson. If my wife says a word twice in a row, it means to pay attention to it, and do it more than I normally would.

The repeated word was “clean,” and I apparently did not get the fact that “clean  clean” meant REALLY clean. It started a few days before my wife’s folks came to visit. As is usually the case, she wants the house to be spotless. I do not understand this, because we have two small children, and the only way for the house to become spotless and stay that way is to move out right after cleaning.

When my wife announced that it was time to start cleaning, she said that she didn’t want to clean the house. She wanted to “clean clean.” I nodded, and proceeded to clean. My wife was in charge of upstairs, while I tackled the downstairs.

Thinking I had everything in check, I told my wife that she could go on to bed, and I would finish the cleaning. I went to bed a short while later feeling quite proud of my accomplishment. I woke the next morning, bragged to my wife about the progress we had made, and shuffled on off to work. When my phone rang at work a while later, I knew something was wrong when my wife said, “I thought you said you CLEANED cleaned?”

“Uh, I did clean.”

“I thought we were going to CLEAN clean!?!?!?!”

Immediately, I went into self-preservation mode. “Well, you went to bed. I did what I could.”

Wow, was that the wrong answer. “I went to bed, because you told me you only had a little left to CLEAN clean!”

Realizing this conversation was going nowhere, I went on the offensive. “Hey, the house is clean. What didn’t get done?” I was sure she had no answer for this.

“Well, first off, there are lip marks on the window in the kitchen. That’s just disgusting.” Note to self: Inflatable Face Game is now verboten. “And there’s yogurt or something on the dining room floor.”

Now, before I continue, let me state for the record that we do not live in a pigsty. As most parents can tell you, a yogurt stain here or some lip marks there are pretty par for the course. The main problem we have is with toys being all over the house. And it doesn’t matter if you put them up at night. They toys will sneak from their shelves and repopulate the house, often multiplying overnight. One night alone, a Wiggles board game spawned a Chutes and Ladders and two Candylands.

But the problem is when I am in charge of cleaning, I am more of a big picture kind of guy. Toys in order on the shelves? Check. Dishes up? Check. Cushions organized so that they are aligned in the proper way, alternating patterns and never EVER showing more than or fewer than three corners, except for the outside one, which MUST be on the right side? Check. (Perhaps that last one is for me and my neuroses only.)

So you can imagine my dismay when my wife told me that neatly stacking books on shelves was cleaning, not clean cleaning. Apparently, scrubbing baseboards is part of cleaning cleaning. I have to be honest with you? I have never scrubbed a baseboard in my life. And you know why? Because I don’t notice baseboards. Truth of the matter, I didn’t even know we had baseboards. And I certainly didn’t know they needed cleaning. What are people doing staring at the baseboards, anyway? They’ll run into a table.

So my wife finished up where I left off, which was apparently at about the 10 percent mark. Of course, when I came home, I made a point of telling her how clean the baseboards looked. She told me that she hadn’t had time to clean the baseboards. To be honest, I couldn’t even tell. And then I ran into a table.