If You Give a Mom a Day Off

This blog is written in the style of If You a Mouse a Cookie, If You Give a Pig a Pancake, If you Take a Mouse to School, and If You Give a Moose a Muffin by Laura Numeroff. We love these stories and I often realize how very much my life runs like the story-line of the characters.

This is really how my day went today...enjoy!

If You Give a Mom a Day Off

If you give a mom a day off, chances are she'll look around the house and realize it's been neglected far too long. So she'll decide to clean up. She'll make a list of things to do. After a few revisions to the list, she'll decide to start with the laundry.

So she will go into her boys' rooms to remove the sheets from their beds. While she is in her older boy's room, she'll notice that Hurricane Andrew blew through during the night. Since her boy is sick, she will start to pick up the mess.

As she picks up the mess, she might realize that the room would look much better with the dresser against "that" wall, the bookcase on the other side of the window, and the bed centered in the room. So, she will start to slide all the Legos, Lincoln Logs, Hotwheels, and Science Stuff out of the room and into the hallway. All the noise and commotion will bring the boys running into the room to see what's happening.


The boys will decide Mommy is more interesting to watch than the tree shredder a few door down so they'll stand in her way and offer suggestions. As they watch, she will attempt to move the ten-story Lego house out of the bedroom and into the hallway. Halfway through the process, the Lego house will come crashing down into tiny little pieces. This will make the older boy cry so she will remind him that she is the one who built it and promises to put it back together later. To make him stop crying, she will promise to make it even better than it was before.

Once the floor is cleared of all debris, she will start pulling the drawers out of the dresser in order to move it. When she moves the dresser, she will notice there are gems, mummies, dinosaurs, marbles and pirate money on the floor where the dresser used to be. So she will start to clean up the mess.

As she sorts the gems, mummies, etc., she might notice that many of the gems are really pieces of blacktop and nondescript rocks from the sandbox at school. So she will slyly separate those "gems" from the other stuff so she can throw them away when the boys aren't looking.

After the dresser is moved, she will be able to move the bed. After pulling the bed away from the wall, she will notice that there are even more treasures to clean up and "sort". Once that is taken care of, she will be able to move the bookcase.

Just before she moves the bookcase, she might notice that she will need to remove a shelf that is screwed into the wall where she wants the bookcase to go. So she will get one of her husband's screwdrivers and attempt to take out the screws holding the shelf in place.

She will discover that the people who lived in the house before used industrial-strength screws to attach things to walls. So she will try even harder. She will successfully remove two of the four screws but realizes the final two are not going to budge. So she will pull and the screws will come out of the wall, along with the drywall attached to them.

So she will go out to the garage to get the spackling compound. She will patch up the holes in the drywall and notice some other spots left by the screw-happy, previous owners. She will spackle those areas, also. She wonders if she ought to touch up the areas with paint and wisely decides to wait for another day.

She will move the bookcase to its new location and look around. She will notice that the arrangement looks good but it is still just as messy. So she will start cleaning up the mess. After the room is dusted, vacuumed, and organized she will take a break.

When she sits down and waits for her emails to load, she will take a look around. As she looks around, she will noticed that the rest of the house is still a mess. And chances are, if she notices the house is still a mess, she'll want another "day off".