Lucy has a love (read:obsession) with wiping things down. As soon as she gets her little paws on ANY sort of white cloth, she drops to her hands and knees, then proceeds to vigorously scrub the floor. It doesn’t matter whether it’s dirty or clean, she’ll wipe it.

But it keeps getting more and more embarrassing. We’ve been in public restaurants where she’ll see a napkin on the floor and she’ll slip out of my grasp, drop to her hands and knees, then proceed to vigorously scrub the floor. People look at me, aghast, thinking “what the heck do you make this poor baby do for you at home?” And trust me, she did NOT learn this from me. As many of you know, I am not compulsive about that at all. Grammar, yes, scrubbing on my hands and knees, no.

She’ll also take the “naked” Swiffer (sans cleaning pad) and clean the floors. So, this weekend I had an epiphany. Would it be SO wrong to give her the tools to actually clean? I mean, she’s going through the motions anyway, right? I decided to actually put the moistened cleaning cloth on the end of the Swiffer and let her go to town. She was entertained for at least 20 minutes, which is years in Lucy time.

Talk about killing two birds with one stone. At this point, I can’t really give her a Clorox wipe since I fear it will end up in her mouth. If I tried to invent a kid-friendly cleaning product, I bet someone would call CPS.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 13th, 2010 at 11:28 pm and is filed under Parenting, Yikes. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.