Mr. Clean No Match for My Baby

So, Monday my Chanukah present arrived. A little late, but that wasn't the Hoos' fault. Her name is Gabby and she cleaned my house. She removed stuck on gunk from my hard-wood floors, sucked ground in cookies out of my living room rug, and scrubbed my bathroom. Honestly, this was one of the best presents EVER.

Unfortunately, LP doesn't much notice when the house is clean. Probably because she is so good at making it messy. Yesterday was a true testament to her ability to be a one-girl wrecking crew.

While I was making her dinner, she was on the floor of our office coloring on flip chart paper (with washable markers) and eating Cheerios from a bag. As soon as I walk into the room to check on her, she picks up the bag and upends it, relishing in scattering Cheerios over the entire floor surface of the office. And, in case any cereal got stuck in the bag, she shook it several times for good measure.

Fortunately, her dinner was done; I picked her up, strapped her into her booster in the dining room and set the mac n' cheese in front of her so that I could go and attempt to locate every last Cheerio and chuck them. Of course, after collecting the fallen cereal I return to the dining room to discover macaroni on the floor, on the table, on the chair and pretty much everywhere except in LP's mouth. ARRGGHHH.

I leave her strapped in the booster while I clean up the dinner and attempt to wipe it off of all of the surfaces before it solidifies into gunk that requires more effort and energy to remove than I have at this point. I then take her out of the booster and tell her to run away before I throttle her. She runs into the kitchen, climbs up on the kitchen chair and pounds on the table yelling out "more!" because apparently she is still hungry after throwing more macaroni than she ate.

Will I ever learn? Probably not because I give her a spoon and some applesauce and closely supervise her as she spoons the sweet goodness into her mouth. After 5 minutes of watching her eat (as you can imagine a toddler feeding herself applesauce is a time-consuming process, she only ate 1/4 of the container at this point), I figure I can turn away to the sink to make some progress cleaning stuff up. Within two minutes applesauce is smeared on the table, the chair, the tile floor... If you are keeping count this is the THIRD ROOM she has "uncleaned" in less than an hour.

As part of my present, we were going to have Gabby return every two weeks to clean the house for a few months. I am thinking at this point that every other day still wouldn't be frequently enough...