CD Clean-up

Every once in a while, amid the day to day monotony that is our lives, I come up with a GREAT idea. Today was one of those days.

After a busy weekend (which culminated Sunday night in a houseful of friends and kids), we woke on Monday morning to . . . well, as my dad would say, a pigsty. Toys everywhere. Crumby counters. Dust. Dried grass & dog hair on the floor. You get the picture.

I needed to get the house clean, but since this was our first official day of summer break, I didn't want to start it off on a sour note. So I instituted CD CLEAN-UP. Here's how it works:

1. Pick a fun, peppy CD. We chose High School Musical 2.

2. Assign a certain number of rooms that you want cleaned. I picked 6. Jared was given 3 (boys' bedroom, reading room & garage) and Micah was given 3 (Emma's room, homeschool room & kitchen).

3. Play the CD. Actually, blare it on the stereo. It has to be loud enough to be heard in all rooms of the house. The kids have the length of one song to quickly clean one of their assigned rooms. As soon as the song is over, they have to stop what they're doing, even if the room isn't finished, and move on to their next assigned room.

4. After the first 3 songs, they switch room assignments. So, for songs #4-6, they are cleaning the rooms that their brother had already cleaned. They have to keep cleaning throughout the whole song, so if the room had been pretty well cleaned the first time, then they have to get creative and do a deeper clean (dusting, cleaning under furniture, windows, etc.)

5. The goal for my competitive boys was to try to have their assigned rooms cleaned so well on the first round that their brother had to really stretch to find something to clean on round 2.

By the end of 6 songs, our house looked fabulous! And we were all laughing and having a great time together.