And often, to borrow a phrase from Elton John, rude, vile pigs at that.
Bonnie and I spent much of Saturday trying to clean up after our three kids, who steadfastly refuse to clean up after themselves. I'm just on the borderline of tolerating messes in their rooms -- they are, after all, their rooms, and I remember well how territorial I was about my room as a yute -- but I absolutely can't stand it when their messes spill over into the rest of the hallway.
On Saturday I was tasked with mopping the kitchen floor -- a chore Bonnie finds particularly loathsome and something that my kids have demonstrated a stark incompetence at doing effectively. So I filled up the kitchen sink with hot water and Mr. Clean and got to work. And immediately ran into trouble.
It turns out that beneath the kitchen table, they'd managed to kick or otherwise grind into the ceramic tiles several days' worth of breakfast cereal and dinner detritus, including some desserts. Thank God it's late enough in the year that the ants have gone underground, because I have no doubt we'd have a full on infestation by now.
The stuff didn't come up with a mop. I had to get down on my knees with a scouring pad to get some of it off, it was so heavily encrusted.
That's only the floor. Every day that I can remember, I walk downstairs to find the kitchen table glazed over with stickiness from a mixture of milk and sweetened cereal, or, in the event we have waffles in the freezer, maple syrup. Every day that I can remember, I shout like an enraged gorilla at them to come back downstairs (or in Emme's case, out from her room) to clean up the mess they made.
The worst part is that they don't pay attention to what they're doing -- they'll open the cabinet door beneath the sink (where I keep the trash pail) and absently drop things in there without bothering to check that it's actually made it into the pail. So inevitably I'll come back later and find a mound of wrappers, crumbs and food bits in a pile near the trash can, but not actually in the trash. If we didn't have a septic system I'd pay to have a disposal installed, which would help to remedy that particular problem, but still.
Argh.