Steve sent me off to St. George for a much need mental wellness weekend. Life and struggles had it's negative grip on me and I needed some time away from schedules and responsibilities to reconnect to my spiritual, mental, and physical side. I spent time reading conference talks and the scriptures, attending the temple, running, petting Jesse (yes, she got to come too...she's my therapy dog!), cooking, watching old movies and laughing at sitcoms from yesteryear (Cosby's, Roseanne, The Andy Griffith Show--who knew that they taught so many good parenting skills??), shopping, painting frames and adding fun touches to the decor of our St. George house. Meanwhile, Steve was holding down the fort back home, hosting girls from Lifeline with Madi, making Sunday dinner, and (every time I talked to him) cleaning the house/doing the laundry. Literally, everytime I called home he mentioned how he was cleaning, cleaning, cleaning the house. Wowsers, I should go out of town more often! Even more pressing on my mind was the thought, "was our house really THAT dirty?" Needless to say, I was very excited to come home to a sparkling clean home. When I arrived home Sunday night, I was greeted with cleaned off kitchen counters and a humming dishwasher. The Sunday dinner had been cleaned up and neatly boxed away in plastic containers in the fridge. The bedroom was picked up and the bed made. On the surface, everything was beautiful. But, as I looked closer, I saw laundry baskets full of clothes...clean clothes, but not folded or put away clothes. The next morning as I got ready for the day, I noticed that the toilets had not been scrubbed, bathroom counters, sinks and floors had not been cleaned. Hmmmm, with I smile on my face I realized that Steve and I have very different cleaning styles: he gets rid of the surface piles of junk, while I clean the dirt. When I clean, he doesn't think or see clean, and obviously I was not seeing a complete clean when HE worked so hard to clean. I love and appreciate his efforts, but now I know: We are two halves of the whole job. It takes both of us cleaning in our "complete" way to really complete the job.
