November 26, 2001
Time
___ After about a month of slacking off, we're back. Did you miss us?
___ I'm not sure where the time went, but wherever it went, it sure flew there fast. A friend said to me today: "I think I must have slept all the way through October. Seems like it was Labor Day, then all the sudden I woke up today and it was nearly Thanksgiving."
___ I agree. And so does much of America, I believe. We're blaming it on our preoccupation with the terrorist attacks and subsequent war, but it's probably more than that as well.
___You'd think in a family like ours--where one adult leaves the house every day to go to work and another works at home--there would be enough division of labor to ensure that everything gets done.
MARK WINGFIELD
___ Well, I'm finally on the brink of admitting that it just isn't so. It doesn't matter how hard we try, the house always gets dirty again, the laundry basket fills itself with dirty clothes overnight, and the kitchen counter sprouts dirty dishes while we're not looking.
___ Where does all that laundry come from?
___ Alison will say a major part of the problem is that I have too many irons in the fire--too many volunteer jobs at church, with Scouts and so forth. She likes to make it look like I'm the only one in the family who can't say no. But let the record reflect that she spends many a day at the boys' school doing various volunteer tasks as well.
___And life is just hectic these days.
___I don't recall it being this way when we were growing up. Of course, we only had four channels of TV to choose from. That's something Luke and Garrett recently realized and were horrified by.
___ "You mean you didn't have Cartoon Network?" they asked almost in unison.
___ "No, we didn't."
___"And no Kids WB?"
___"No, not that either."
___"Well surely you had Nickelodeon."
___"No, we only got to watch cartoons on Saturday mornings," I explained.
___And then I started listing all the other things we didn't have back in the 1960s--video games, answering machines, computers, video cameras, soccer teams.
___But we still had dishes and laundry and dust. I just can't figure out why it didn't seem to pile up so quickly.
___Housekeeping is not my forte. It isn't that I don't appreciate and enjoy a clean, neat house. I just can't seem to keep it that way.
___Claiming it isn't in my blood won't work either. My parents were both neat-and-clean-niks. My brother is the organized engineer type. When I was growing up, our house always looked good (except for my room). As they warned Mark when we got married, "We tried."
___Unfortunately, our boys seem to have inherited their mother's messiness.Times two. Beanie babies, water guns, action figures, books, socks and shoes multiply theminute they hit the floor--and they are rarely put back in their appointed places. Add to that their love for Legos which tend to spread all over the floor and can't be put back because "we're in the middle of a project, Mom," and you can guess that our house is not going to be on the cover of House Beautiful anytime soon.
ALISON WINGFIELD
___And then there is Molly, our "girl." She has a tendency to spread her toys and bones in concentric circles all over the living room. The minute I put them in her basket, she systematically takes them out and stashes them in various places that only make sense to her. She does the same thing with the boys' outside toys. If we leave them in the storage bucket in the backyard, it doesn't take her long to spread them all over the yard.
___Now we come to Mark. And his volunteer jobs. And the paraphernalia that comes with those. Many times he has not only said "yes" but has actually volunteered for things no one even asked him to do! (If you sense a little tension on this subject, you are correct.)
___My dining room has become the Cub Scout filing room, our bedroom includes wares from Scouts, the church strategic-planning task force stuff and reams of Sunday School lesson notes. And our garage, well, I'm not even sure what is in the garage.
___Suffice it to say that even if I was a neatnik, I don't think I could stem the tide of this messy family. Now I need to leave the house before I get the urge to actually clean something.
___ We've got the involvement and commitment part down pretty well. That better account for something, because if cleanliness is next to godliness, we're in big trouble.
PREVIOUS HE SAID/ SHE SAID COLUMNS:
1999: 6/16, 6/23, 6/30, 7/14, 7/21, 7/28, 8/4, 8/11, 8/18, 8/25, 9/1, 9/8, 9/15, 9/29, 10/6, 10/13, 10/20, 10/27 11/17, 11/24, 12/1, 12/8, 12/15, 12/22,
2000: 1/5, 1/19, 1/26, 2/2, 2/9, 2/16, 2/23, 3/1, 3/8, 3/22, 3/27, 4/3, 4/10, 4/17, 4/24, 5/1, 5/8, 5/15, 5/22, 5/29, 6/5, 6/12, 6/19, 6/26, 7/10, 6/26, 6/19, 7/17, 7/24, 7/31, 8/7, 8/14, 8/21, 8/28, 9/4, 9/11, 9/18, 9/25, 10/2, 10/9, 10/16, 11/6, 11/20, 11/27, 12/11.
2001: 1/1, 1/8, 1/22, 2/5, 2/12, 3/5, 4_19, 4/2, 4/23, 5/14 6/11, 6/25, 7/9, 7/23, 8/13, 9/3, 9/17, 10/9
Get printer-friendly version of this story
Send this story to a friend
News of religion, faith, missions, Bible study and Christian ministry among Texas Baptist churches, in the Southern Baptist Convention ( SBC ) and around the world.
Contents/ Masthead / Why We're Here / Links / Archive / E-mail us/ SUBSCRIBE!
