Mopping up fun

Having a young dog in the house is a lot of things: fun, challenging, frustrating, rewarding and sleep-depriving. Our French Bulldog puppy rounds out a zoo of another Frenchie, an English Bulldog and a Maine Coon cat. Better put, our French Bulldog puppy secures our spot in the Hall of Insane Choices.

On the heels — ha ha ha, that’s funny because none of our dogs can heel— sorry, interrupted my own story. Let me rollover and fetch that thought.

On the heels of all the puppy cuteness comes the slow-to-potty-trainness.

Part of the reason we got this puppy was that the other two potty trained so quickly. We thought either we had a knack for picking intelligent dogs or had some Ceasar Milan savant gene that made dogs brilliant. 

But, alas, there wasn’t some cosmic intervention converting us into dog (or puppy) whisperers.  We just got lucky with the older two.

The point I’m avoiding sharing is that this story starts (that’s right, we haven’t even started yet) with me finding number one from number three on the floor. 

Thankfully our house is like a testbed for all cleaning products.  We’re always experimenting with the latest spray-on, no-rinse, magic window foam or an as-seen-on-TV wonder broom. All the while, two (don’t ask) Roomba robot vacuums battle it out in the living room.

Today’s number one clean-up features our newest purchase, the O-Cedar EasyWring™ Spin Mop & Bucket System. In my hands, the rag on a stick teeters on being a discipline tool, but with my stellar self-control, I use the mop for its intended purpose: to provide the reminder that I have graduated to adulthood and to suck the life out of me.

I go to rinse the mop by putting the mop head in the bucket part of the trademarked system (you saw the superscript ^TM, right?) and found the “foot-activated pedal that allows for hands-free wringing and controlled water release.”

And it was fun!

I re-rinsed the mop just so I could use the foot pedal to spin the mop head. Flashbacks to centrifugal force demonstrations that would have been so much more entertaining (and effective) if they had just used the O-Cedar EasyWring System.

I found another spot that could have been a shadow or dirt, I didn’t care.  I just wanted to mop again so I could spin again.

Wait, aren’t I mopping?  Isn’t mopping supposed to be a chore?  Aren’t chores supposed to be mundane and boring?

Why was this fun?  Why had I mopped the entire utility room?  Why was I secretly hoping to find more dirty floor to clean?  Ok, too far.  That last part is only partly true.

 O-Cedar missed “fun” on their EasyWring™ Spin Mop & Bucket System marketing.

Because, yes, chores are a necessary evil of being a functioning adult.

Yes, mopping is one of those things that helps you look like a functioning adult.

But, why do we think that being a functioning adult can’t be fun?  HELLO!!!  “Fun" is the first part of “functioning” (thank you Grammarly).

I may have graduated to adulthood, but this mop-in-hand revelation has been a master's thesis discovery.

Yes, we have to do chores. But who said those chores have to be cumbersome, boring and life-sucking?

We’re all out there adulting but I know there have to be some of you looking to have fun WHILE adulting (this is not to be confused with “adult fun” … it’s not that kind of blog, folks).

I remember making staff-meeting-bingo cards that not only made the meeting fun, they helped me pay better attention.  And, I learned to engage my personal filter to stifle me yelling “BINGO” when that final company buzzword got me a straight-line bingo. I mean, it was no EasyWring mop bucket, but it was enough of a distraction to keep me awake and attentive when the boss was there.

Even in a situation as dark and un-fun as preparing my Dad for burial (he had passed), I was able to find light-hearted humor in the situation.  It wasn’t an EasyWring mop bucket, but it was enough humor to bring levity when it I needed the most.

Maybe those nautical sea-shanty singers are on to something. Or Cinderella and the Seven Dwarfs whistling while they work. They wound’t have needed a shanty or whistling if they’d had the EasyWring mop bucket, but we can’t go back and rewrite history or redraw cartoons.

What we can do is find the fun.

If O-Cedar can make mopping fun, certainly we can find the fun in other tasks.