I, being a focused, consistent, persistent balabusta who knew exactly what was contained on one shelf in her house, brought down the fishbowl with much regret

“Start early,” they said.

“Be focused, consistent, and persistent,” they said.

“Make a schedule and stick with it,” they said.

“Is there a they aside from the voices in your head?” my husband asks, as I sit cross-legged on the living room floor surrounded by 2,497 pictures. (I know the exact count because I paid .09 cents for each print, plus shipping, and ate into my kids’ Shabbos shoes budget.)

It’s 15 days to Pesach and my pantry may be filled with pasta and the kitchen floor coated in cheerio grounds, but against all odds I had done it and put all of the photos through 2016 into albums! Only 38 more months to go through.

******

I’d had enough with my year-after-year mad-last-minute cleaning rush and decided to start like the real balabustas do — right after Chanukah. I made a fancy spreadsheet, set up a timer and reminder alert on my phone, and keyed in all the rooms, closets, and targeted areas to clean. I adjusted the start date to account for the week I lost inputting all the data and we were ready to go. “We” meaning “me.” And the voices in my head.

I started with the junk closet on the first floor. I’d allocated two hours to complete the closet, divided over two days. I was committed to making the system work and went to attack the top shelf first, as per the battle plan. Which is when I hit the first roadblock: I needed a stepstool. The stepstool should have been right inside the closet, folded and blocking access to the lower three shelves. But it was missing.

My sharp sleuthing skills led me to the dining room, my suspicions growing at the sound of ill-concealed urgent whispers.

I found the kids surrounding the stepstool, with Yoni on the top rung holding the bristles of a broom and scraping the stick along the ceiling, precariously close to the chandelier.

“You almost got it! Scrape it harder!”

“What are you doing?!” I yelled, even though it was pretty obvious, but no one ever really answers me anyway.

“Oh. Hi, Ma. Ummm. Nothing. Don’t worry. We’re getting it down.”

Oh, no, they weren’t. There’s no getting down a sticky hand without leaving a tell-tale greasy spot on the painted surface. There were already two similar spots up there plus another on the playroom wall, which was why I had banned those sticky hand toys from the house. They, along with slime, putty, and glitter, were illegal contrabands.

I know, I should have let them deal with the consequences and scrub the ceiling clean, but my cleaning clock was ticking and I needed that stepstool. I left the blue palm with a trailing tail adorning my dining room ceiling and added to the cleaning chart Sticky Hands on Ceiling.

I glanced at my watch; 42 minutes left. Time sure flies by fast when you have kids.