I knew cleaning was bad for your health!

Lucy has just turned four months old. She is in more of a routine now although it is not completely predictable. She does settle for a couple of long sleeps in the day which gives me time to get a few more things done around the house. Kerrie on the other hand is rivalling David Blaine in her desire to entertain us with her antics in escapology. Put a gate in her way and she will simply climb over it or in the case of the stair and kitchen gates she puts her feet under the gate and pushes upwards, open pops the gate and away she goes, rather proudly I might add.  Kerrie dashes around the house like a mini tornado opening cupboards, emptying drawers and toy boxes leaving a path of destruction in her wake. She is naturally inquisitive, she wants to explore her surroundings. She wants to press buttons and open boxes. She wants to try Chloe's shoes on, she wants to test out their toys, she wants to look at their books.  She wants to do everything she sees the other kids do and she has a million questions to go with her journey.

When Kerrie wakes up in the morning it is exactly as if someone has pushed her ON switch. She comes to life straight away, no warm up required, totally unlike James who needs a good hour at least to come around in the morning. I pity James on the odd days I oversleep. If there is one thing he loathes it is a mad dash in the morning. The poor boy does not like to be rushed, he likes to wake up slowly taking his own sweet time. He will be ready when he is ready and any attempt to make him move faster results in the opposite effect.

 We have tended to restrict Kerrie to the living room most of the time, we keep that room very baby and toddler friendly.  Toys with small parts such as Lego, jigsaws,  board games and art materials are kept in the dining room so she can't get hold of them unless she is supervised. The dining room is also home for a lot of toys such as the farm animals, cars and the play food which are taken into the living room to be played with as there is more space to play on the floor.

This has worked well until now that Kerrie can escape the confines of the living room but at only just three she still does not understand why she can't play with everything the older children play with. Her speech is excellent but her reasoning and understanding still have a long way to go. I decided that if she is going to be spending more time in the dining room now it would need a bit of rearranging so as to keep the smaller toys out of her reach.  I also decided that this would be the ideal opportunity to give the room a spring clean. I should have known that this would be a bad idea.

I don't like cleaning, well it's not that I don't like it as such it's just that I can think of so many other things I could be doing instead so I begrudge the time spent. However I last time I gave the room a really good clean was at Christmas when I was still pregnant and nesting so after 4 months of only a cat lick and a promise it really did need a good deep clean.

So I set to work. I started in the corner with the computer cupboard. The aim was to make the room Kerrie friendly so that she would think she was allowed to play with much more while everything she shouldn't touch would be out of her reach. Henry the hoover was brought out of the darkness of the  under stairs cupboard and all was going well until I hit upon the idea of hoovering the computer keyboard and two of the letters disappeared up the curly pipe, oops! While I was mentally handing myself a virtual award for stupid idea of the day in walks Steve. Fair play to him he resisted the urge to laugh and instead helped me search through  the very dusty contents of the hoover bag to find the lost letters, I and O in case you were wondering.

 Of course the hoover bag was full, this is me we are talking about here but he did actually manage to find the I key. As for the O well sadly no such luck there and so our keyboard is now missing a letter. The space where the O should be stands as a permanent reminder to me for when I next get the urge to spring clean. Since all I ended up with was a wheeze from all the dust we had to search through and a broken keyboard to boot next time I should leave well alone!