Experiments in Dadification: Speed Cleaning

I do not like to clean.
Cleaning is the bane of my existence.

Fortunately, I don't mean that in the Batman sense, in which case I would be saying that cleaning is a super strong villain determined to crush me.
While cleaning may feel like soul-crushing, back-breaking work, it has never actually broken my back.
Which Bane has.
To Batman.
This is common knowledge, so hopefully that doesn't spoil anything from the movie for those who weren't already in the know. They probably won't do that part in the movie anyway.

See here.
Seriously though, does anyone know what's up
with the dinosaur in the background? 

So yeah, like I was saying, I don't like cleaning. The kids seem to think that cleaning is fun, but only the kind where you're spraying water and wiping it up. Not the kind where you pick up stuff and put it away in an orderly fashion. They hate that.

It can be hard to get the kids to actually pick up their stuff, and harder still to get them to do it without whining and moaning and just generally being unpleasant. This problem is made worse by the fact that my kids are extremely adept at making messes. It is my firmly held belief that the trashed hotel room scene from The Hangover (see also: that Geico commercial with Richard Simmons) is not actually the result of a night of drunken debauchery, but rather, what happened when they let a handful of toddlers play in there for like 10 minutes.

In an attempt to make the kids clean up more of their messes and to keep it from being unpleasant for any longer than it needs to be, I have started to do what I call Speed Cleaning with the kids.
It works like this:

I tell the kids that we need to clean up as much as we can and that we only have two minutes to do it. That is the most important part right there. Even if the place isn't clean when time runs out, we stop. That just means we will need to do another two minutes a little while later. Usually, I end up letting it slide on a bit longer than two minutes, but the important thing here is that they know that they only have a short time to get it all done. They feel rushed to do it, so they actually start actively working on it. Also, they see an end in sight, so even if it is unpleasant they know it won't last long. Honestly, it's much easier to do something that sucks if you know it won't last long.

We've been doing this fairly regularly for the last week or so, and it's been going well. I'm sure plenty of you do this already, but for those that haven't tried it, why not give it a shot? I am a fan.

It's hardtotypeon a broken keyboard

I am not going to edit this post.

There will be grammatical errors, missing letters, and general weirdness.

This post was made written half on my phone, and half on my broken keyboard. 

Neither option is ideal. Or even good.

At least the spacebar probably works properlyon that keyboard.

So a little while back, Cam got his hands on my computer. Being three and not having any idea what one actually does with a computer, he slammed his hands down on the keyboard and pulled down. In just a split second, he had pulled off and damaged several keys and the mechanisms that make them work properly. I realize that replacement keyboards are fairly cheap and easy to replace, but I have yet to do so. Some keys get stuck for a moment, and some don't register at all unless you press hard and long a few times (haha - apparently, I can't say hard and long together without chuckling to myself). Or two laptops in the house are completely falling apart. They've been broken, torn apart, and reassembled multiple times, and there is little more than necessity and wishful thinking holding them together at this point. Anyway, as a result of all of this, I haven't been posting much recently. Sorry.

Today I an trying something a but different and blogging from my phone. Weird. I'm just waiting to read through this later on and find that autocorrect made me say something totally weird or creepy. You know, like change the word keyboard to balls or something like that. you all injure you've been there (perfect example. I wrote that yesterday, and I don't even remember what that was supposed to be. It makes for a great illustration of my point, so I'm leaving it).

What I am tryingto get at is that 

A) It is lame that I haven't been posting

B) I have my reasons for said lameness

C) I will try to be less lame

D) It's not going to be pretty