How To Clean a Floor?

In my house, it sometimes feels as though getting the floor clean is an impossible task.  I have wood floors in most rooms and linoleum in the kitchens and bathrooms.  With carpet, you barely notice lint and small amounts of dirt. Sadly, dark wood floors do not allow any of that to be camouflaged!  Don't get me wrong, I would never traded them for a house full of carpet.  The thought of that is enough to give me nightmares!

So here is what typically happens.  By typically, I mean this just happened so it's fresh in my mind!

I start in the living room.  The tree is up. I clean the whole room as I go from section to section.  The kids were down for an evening nap.  I pull out the couch and was pleasantly surprised that there was not a huge amount of stuff under it. Naturally the sectional traps a lot of lint, but there was only a minimal amount of toys and paper.  Yay me!  I swept everything out to the corner by the door.  The walls had some spots and the floor moldings needed to be dusted.  Since we have large windows, I took the time to clean the window sills as well.  I get anal about the little things.  Then I pulled out the mop and cleaned under the couches, waited for them to dry and then put the couches back. 

By this time, Ashton was up and feeling rotten. We sat on the couch until Brenna woke up. I made him really happy by putting him down and grabbing her.  But, I still had to sweep up the dirt pile and pick out the stray toys.  Brenna thinks dirt is another type of toy and I was not up for that one.  I sat her down and managed to get about 25 percent of the living room swept and mopped. 

You're probably thinking now that I should really know how this clean floor thing works...right?  Well, before the night ended, I had two cups of juice, macaroni and cheese and a melted Popsicle on the clean section of the floor. As if that was not enough, I had Sarah cover the Popsicle juice up with a couple of paper towels until I could get to it.  In the span of 10 minutes, my darling Brenna grabbed the Playdoh table and walked it over to the wet Popsicle paper towels and caught it on the edge of the table and dragged it halfway across the living room before I noticed what she was doing. I re-cleaned that section and declared defeat in regards to the rest of the floor!

So here I am back to how I'm going to get this blasted floor cleaned!  And how am I going to get the rest of the house done as well!  I know things will get better when Ashton gets well, but then it will be mud or paint or some other lovely thing. 

I did manage to get the tree out today and clean the section of the floor that was under it.  Slowly it's happening, but this re-cleaning is daunting!  Then again, it does remind me that I have sweet little feet that provide much joy along with the many messes.  I guess I'll just have to resign myself to halfway cleaned floors for a few years more!