a little cameo

While most people are stressing about whether they’ve bought the right present, enough presents, or finished their shopping, my stress levels are about something entirely different. The state of my house.

Good friends of mine, the kind that hark all the way back to high school, are coming to stay with me over the Christmas period. I love to have people stay, so this is a welcome visit. It’s just that my house is pretty messy at the moment and they arrive in approximately 28 hours. And those 28 hours include at least 9 hours of work and with a bit of luck, at least 8 hours of sleep. So there will have to be a concentrated cleaning effort on Thursday morning.

I’m also quite nervous because I need to make sure that the place is TOTALLY spick and span. There isn’t allowed to be any missed insect on the carpet, no mountain of things that I’m planning on throwing out in some random room, no stray hair in the bath, and zero dust on all flat surfaces. The reason being that my friends are bringing their 7 1/2 month old baby with them.

I checked earlier in the week that he wasn’t crawling, because that would just add a whole other complexity to the stay. I’ve had nightmares of him crawling around the floor towards an interesting thing that has taken his eye, sitting up, looking around at us talking animatedly to each other and then extending a chubby baby hand toward the hairy rogue caterpillar invading my house.

You see my house does creepy crawlies exceedingly well. There are currently many hairy ‘soon to be moth’ caterpillars sneaking in under the front door, a bold fat mouse that isn’t shy of making his presence known, three slugs in the shower and bath, an army of small black ants on my desk, goodness knows how many spiders, huge starship sized mosquitos and a skink trying to make friends with my router cables.

I guess I should be thankful that the snakes are staying away.

Keeping the menagerie under control is my top priority for the duration of their stay. I need to protect the baby from them, keep him (and his parents) in a bubble of blissful ignorance about the entomologists paradise that is my house and the best way is with a clean and tidy place.