We did some crazy amounts of spring cleaning this weekend. No room was safe from our mad dusting, sweeping, scrubbing and mopping skills. And, just as we feared, our boys were 
under our feet the whole time. We had three choices:
- Give it up for the time being and try to finish the job little by little before they woke up and after they went to bed
- Beg our friends and family for some last minute babysitting help
- Find ways for them to be involved in ways that they’d be engaged and we wouldn’t be tripping over them every time we turned around.
Choice #1 and #2 were out before we even gave them a second thought, so we set to finding jobs that a 2, 4 and 5-year-old could do safely without slowing down our progress.
As we moved from room to room, we found small projects that were room-specific, didn’t involve cleaning products, but were genuinely helpful. In the kitchen, while we were scrubbing things, we had the boys organize the cabinets that they could reach without having to climb. They liked figuring out how to best stack pots and pans and taking cans off of the shelves, dusting them and putting them back in categories of their choosing, which, by the way, turns out really funny with boys this young.
In the living room, their first order of business was taking all the toys that had migrated from the playroom back to their own cozy shelves and toy boxes. Then they gathered up throw pillows and blankets and took them to the laundry room. They also dusted the books and bookshelves, which they thought was pretty rad, because they don’t usually get to handle mom and dad’s books.
I didn’t let them help inside the bathroom while I was cleaning, because I didn’t want them inhaling any chemical fumes. Instead, they sat at the table where I dumped out all my hair accessories, which they sorted into little containers. My husband sat on the other side of the table and sorted nails and screws into plastic peanut butter jars, so they had supervision, and were doing just what daddy was doing.
Throughout the day, they helped with folding laundry and putting it away, along with other simple jobs like putting new liners in the little trash cans. They really felt like they were contributing to the big spring cleaning project, and the best part was, they really were helping us out with little chores that would have taken us a bunch of extra time.
By Sunday evening, our house was spotless and we were all exhausted. We took a victory trip to the neighborhood ice cream stand and the boys went to bed soon after, proud as could be. It was a great, productive weekend, and everyone did their part.
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