Clean Carpets

I love clean floors. The most difficult part about having a baby is I can't sweep, mop, or vacuum my floors for 6 weeks.

I often cheat.

Under normal circumstances, I mop my floors several times a week and sweep at least twice a day. My carpets are vacuumed almost daily. I don't mind so much going to bed with dirty dishes, but the floors need to be clean. If you show up at my house you would find toys that have been played with, often scattered throughout. That doesn't bother me. What gets to me is walking across the tile floor and feeling grit. Wearing a pair of white socks all day and at the end of the day having them not so white on the bottom. I can't stand that. I grew up with a house full of tile and 5 brother and 2 sisters, 10 in all the family. It was near impossible to keep the grit off the floor. We lived on acreage out in the county with cows and pigs and horses and a gravel driveway. Dogs were an always and cats a must. Not inside animals, usually. But with all that working against a clean floor, it was, well, never clean. Okay, maybe for 10 minutes.

And here I am living on a small lot with lots of neighbors and cement streets, grass in the yard, and a lot of rain to wash everything clean, so I can have my clean floors. I do have 5 kids and a husband working against me, but I do my best.

Of course, carpets get dirty no matter how hard you try. I spot clean all the time, and they stay looking somewhat clean, but I know that deep down they really aren't clean. In the beginning of my family when I only had a few children, this was fine. But as my children have multiplied, so has the dirt in my carpet. About a year ago I had had enough and called a professional steam cleaner come out to the house and he parted an hour later with $300. And that didn't clean all the carpeted rooms. A bit frustrating when three months later I felt he needed to come again.

My solution? I went to Costco and bought me my very own carpet cleaner. It's in my house at all times, I can use it whenever I want, and it works really well. My carpets come clean, I hardly have to use any soap, they dry within a few hours, and I can then roll around on the floor and not feel like I need to shower. Happiness!

But then I got pregnant within a few weeks after my purchase of the new cleaner. The vomiting and fatigue hit hard. I laid on the couch for 4 months and didn't do much. At about 20 weeks I mustered up enough energy to pull that blessed machine out of the closet and sure enough, clean carpets. And then yesterday a friend stopped by and I was humiliated by the spots on my carpet. That fatigue just has not left me, even diagnosed anemic, so the tiredness is legitimate. But enough is enough and I could not stand to look at those spots another day. I pulled out the spray bottle and wash rag to start despotting my carpet, put it right back down and walked to the closet where I pulled out my friend, the carpet cleaner. And we spent the next hour scrubbing my living room carpet. And it looks beautiful. I love being able to clean them whenever I want. The baby is coming soon, but with the cleaning I did today, I should be able to wait 6 weeks postpartum before they need cleaned again. The vacuuming, sweeping, and mopping will still be a problem, but I will survive. Last baby I knew the reason I could not mop was because of the motion. So, I got on my hands and knees and mopped, thus bypassing the harmful motion. Right?

Just wanted to share my gratitude for something as simple as a carpet cleaner that brings so much peace into my life. I even caught myself laying on the couch while all the kids were upstairs watching a movie so the house was quiet, and grinning as I looked at my new clean carpet. Silly, I know. But, this is my life. And I love it.