Something had to give, and I picked dust bunnies.

Every year, in the two weeks before the week before Christmas, I face a veritable maelstrom of grading and cleaning and wrapping and cleaning and organizing and grading and cleaning. In addition to finals at work, which means I have a lot of papers to read and numbers to crunch, I am also trying to organize the holiday gifts that have to be mailed in timely fashion to 18 out-of-town relatives, and trying to get the house in reasonable shape for my parents' annual Christmas visit.

I love my parents. And I love this visit. But my parents are people with an almost impossibly clean house.

And I am a person with...well, with two small children, a dog, and a full-time job that is busiest from October-December. In short, I have relatively low standards of tidiness because I have chosen to maintain my relatively high standards of sanity. So...

Quick! Who is the most stressful person who could possibly visit your house, from the standpoint of the frenzy of pre-visit cleansing? You may say your parents (and my preamble here would suggest that is so). Or possibly that colleague whose house is always inhumanly perfect. Or possibly that neighbor who never calls first and invariably stops by when the dishes are piled in the sink and you are still in your pj bottoms. Or possibly that one friend who has a toddler while your children are long past the "everything in the mouth" stage, so that you are constantly worried about overlooked choking hazards.

But I am here to tell you that the most stressful visitor to clean for is none of these people. It is, in fact, the guys who are coming to install your new windows. THOSE guys, unlike your father, your neighbor or your colleague, will go into your laundry room. They will venture into your master bath. They will see the corners and crannies that you can usually keep hidden from visitors. AND, they will vacuum to clean up after themselves, which means they will see the dust bunnies next to the toilet and the grit behind your dryer, if those things exist.

The good news is, that if you have new windows installed a few weeks before your parents visit, you will be able to keep your house reasonably clean until the holidays.

In other helpful cleaning tips (what? installing *mumble*-thousand dollars worth of windows wasn't your idea of a quick and easy means of keeping your house clean? huh..odd...), may I suggest the benefit of rearranging your priorities?

I have finally come to the following (uneasy) conclusions.

1. I cannot keep this house clean on my own.
2. I do not enjoy spending half the weekend, which is our only family time together, assigning jobs and folding laundry.
3. My family doesn't love this either.
4. Instituting the timed "speedy family clean up" at the end of every day makes a huge difference in how tidy things are.
5. If things are kept relatively tidy, the actual dirt is less noticeable.

ERGO: huge time savings on the weekend, since just by rigorously picking up after ourselves on the weekdays, we can occasionally pretend the dirt just isn't there and go sledding instead of mopping the floors or scrubbing the bathrooms on weekends.

I don't recommend this strategy on a permanent basis, but I will say that judicious ignoring of dust bunnies has been good for family morale and my own state of happiness for several weeks now.