Spring Cleaning
Ana's brother and sister-in-law were in town for Alex's birthday and offered to take back a load of stuff with them when they went home today. They live in the same town called Puertollano that Ana's parent's live, about 3 hours drive south of Madrid (barely an hour and a half on the AVE, Spain's amazing high-speed railway). Ana's parents have a big storage shed, so we can throw all of the extra stuff that doesn't fit in the apartment down there. Since we don't have a car, we have to take advantage of these moments when we get them...
In case you don't read this blog often (or pay much attention), we live in a shoebox. A 40 square meter one bedroom apartment with essentially no closet space. We're filled to the brim, so a couple extra bags of Alex's old clothes and toys, plus his unused play gym, etc. all take up WAY too much room. So we gathered all the stuff that we could and while we were at it, we got out the Summer clothes from where they are socked away in our suitcases under the bed and in the top part of the wardrobe. Then, shocked by the amount of dust we threw up doing this, decided to clean while we were at it. Woof.
But it was a great day - so we just threw open the windows and got everything out and it was pure chaos, but Alex loved it because he suddenly was surrounded by a zillion things he had never seen before, all laying chaotically about the place so he could explore while Mom and Dad tried to vacuum the floors and shelves and mop and organize the extra stuff into portable bags and winter clothes into storeable piles.
Ahh. So now it's 10 o'clock and the sky is finally just getting dark and Alex just went off to bed and the windows are still wide open because it's so nice out and you can still hear people bustling around because it was just one of those really nice summer days (easily in the upper 20s/80s today). Everything in the house is organized and clean and though Ana and I are pretty beat from cleaning and entertaining the relatives, we're quite happy and glowing from a day well done.
Ahhhhh... :-)
-Russ