A few weeks ago, my parents spent the weekend with us. In addition to the usual house cleaning they do while they are here and keeping Audrey occupied so we can actually get house projects done (BLESS THEIR HEARTS), they actually STEAM CLEANED our carpets! To give you an idea of how little I like taking care of carpet, over 80% of our house, including the entire basement is now laminant flooring (the looks-like-hardwood, but is soooo much less expensive and easier to maintain) type of flooring.
After we got Jack, our sheltie, it wasn’t too long before I could no longer stand the constantly dirty/ladden with pet hair look of the carpet in our main traffic areas, so we replaced everything but the bedrooms with laminant. While the bedrooms don’t get as much foot traffic, they do tend to get their share of pet puke and other random stains that never quite seem to come out with standard cleaners.
To make a long story short, I was ECSTATIC to come home from a morning of working at church to see my beautiful, steam cleaned carpets! Yeah, that lasted all of about 48 hours. 2 days later, Justin and I were awakened by the all too familiar sound of Jack hacking up his infamous yellow bile puke RIGHT IN THE MIDDLE OF MY THOUROUGHLY CLEANED BEDROOM FLOOR. As if that wasn’t enough, the next night, Mocha felt the need to christen the newly cleaned carpet in Audrey’s room with a lovely red hairball. If you don’t have the picture, 2 of our 3 pets have a habitual vomiting problem, which at times is enough for us to discuss shipping them off to pet boarding school if there was such a thing. It wouldn’t be so bad if they didn’t purposely move TOWARD the 20% of our house covered in carpet when getting sick instead of using the so-easy-to-clean laminant flooring that I so adore.
I just chalk this lesson up to another of God’s ways of reminding me that there are more important things in life than perfect appearances. At the end of the day, I’d much rather have a happy household than a spotless carpet. HOWEVER, if anyone has ever trained an animal to puke in a bucket, please let me know. It would certainly make our lives a little easier:)
