Pick Up After Yourself

Enjoy another installment of my rants on getting my kids to do simple things around the house. Is it working? Not really.

A clever way of keeping the house clean, and the workload down, is to pick up after yourself. This is especially handy advice when it comes to candy wrappers, cookie boxes, and half-finished cans of soda.

It’s great to imagine that a team of mice, ants, and other vermin will come in singing a happy tune and spiff up the place while you enjoy the offerings of Netflix. But, the reality is that this is not going to occur. Granted, I will cede that the pests will actually arrive in force, but they will not be there to help clean up.

Usually the progression of vermin starts like this. You leave a half-empty can of soda and a smashed candy bar on your dresser. Somehow, ants can detect this when they are in the dirt and your unfinished bounty is located on the second floor. They appear in in an orderly fashion and get to work; like the Germans setting up a factory. The key word is precision.

Soon houseflies clue in that there’s a new place to spread tiny bits of fecal matter. They arrive in ones and twos, and maybe one of them lets it slip back at the dung pile that there’s a new place to eat. A wasp, hiding from his family, overhears this and decides to check it out. Now you begin freaking out, not because your room is turning into a trash dump, but because there is a wasp in the house.

Before long, the mice find out about the makeshift food pantry that is your room. They find their way into the garage, somehow climb the wall to get into the attic, and move on to your bedroom. There are two great things to consider when attracting mice. The first is that their teeth grow at something like two feet an hour. So along their journey, they manage to chew holes in everything they encounter. The second is that they literally crap every three minutes.

Finally, if you’re lucky, and your offering to the vermin gods go unnoticed, a band of roaches will get wind of the convention, and roll in. Keep in mind, having roaches show up is like inviting the Hell’s Angels to a birthday party. It’s a bad scene.

How can this pest party be prevented? Clean up after yourself.

As a family we have scrimped and saved to purchase waste receptacles for nearly every room of the house. It has taken a lot of sacrifice, but it’s something we believe in and have made a reality. What’s even better is that the need to walk more than fifteen paces to a trashcan has been almost completely eliminated! It really is a tremendous accomplishment, and I encourage you to use them freely.