I love the 4th of July. I love our party. I hate the preceding week.

I often think I was meant to be a contemplative. No noise, no clutter, no visitors. Instead, I have eight children who inherited my messy gene and my stress reaction of screaming at each other when trying to clean. I have a house full of ___________. (You fill in the blank with anything you can think of and we have it!)

I believe it was Erma Bombeck who made the comment that cleaning while you had small children was like shoveling during a snowstorm. It is so true. However, if you don’t shovel while the snow is falling, you won’t be able to get out your front door by the time the blizzard stops. Trust me, I know. The snow is six feet deep outside the door. Oh wait, no, that would be the pile of shoes inside the door!

So, today we shovel, I mean clean, the house. I am just hoping to get it to that wonderful point of:

“Oh, please excuse the mess! Things were so crazy we didn’t even have time to clean!” LOL!

Tomorrow, we party and when it is all over, we crash and think how it was all worth it. It must be because we keep doing it.