You know that “run around, hurry up, gotta get it done yesterday” routine that we all do when we have company coming?  (Maybe that’s just me…, anyway….)

Well, we did that a couple of weeks ago before our guests arrived, and the tricky part was that the kiddos didn’t know that company was coming.  It was a BIG surprise for them.

So, we did our Saturday chore list on that Friday, and they weren’t too pleased with me since it was Friday and NOT Saturday.  They were pretty sure I’d lost my mind.  But the house wasn’t a wreck by any definition, so the few chores we had really weren’t that much to do.  And the house was indeed ‘company ready’ when the company arrived.  Grandparents and Great-Grandma all arrived in good time, and surprised the heck out of the kiddos.  It was a hoot!

Gram & PawPaw are used to just joining in to life with us, for the most part.  Since they live so far away, they like to just do the things that we do (ball practice, library visits, Dairy Queen runs, etc.) and we usually try to do a few new things while they are here too.  But for the most part, they fall in line with our normal life activities.  This time was a bit different since we had Mimi here too, but with them here for 10 days, a lot of just normal things had to happen while they were here.   I would say our guests didn’t expect to be entertained so much as to just participate with us in the things that we would normally do.

Over the course of the visit, the house got more and more, shall we say, ‘lived in’.

The once-clear coffee table became the landing pad for the new Helicopter Kites that the grandparents brought for the kiddos, and the new pants that need hemming.

The new binoculars that they bought as a gift for my sweetie now sits next to the Willow Tree figurines on my side table.

The backpack we used everyday when we went out for an outing lays next to the stairs, waiting to go out on another trip.

The clothes and towels from our big water fight day (postponed from July 4 to last Friday) were hanging around the bathroom for at least 2 days, and then laid in the floor for another day before the guests left.

The cardboard recycling started to spill out of the blue recycle bag in the corner of the kitchen, and the pantry reverted to it’s regular kid-sorted, rather than mom-sorted, organization.

My house slowly began to look more and more ‘normal’ – our everyday lived-in kind of normal – clean but not perfect, things out of place but not every place, chores to be completed but not yet gotten to.

And nobody cared or seemed to notice.  Everyone just went about our business of visiting and seeing new things together, playing cards in the evenings as an extended family, working as a team on larger-than-usual meals, and so on.

Yet if my house looked like it does at this moment when they arrived, none of us likely would have been comfortable.

It’s not cluttered, not even a hint of messy… it simply isn’t not all ‘put together’ and ‘presentable’.  It’s just normal.

I’m surmising that my guests were all OK with seeing my house in its “normal state” because they walked through the processes with us that caused it to get into that state.  And they came knowing and expecting that they would fall in to step with us doing what we normally do.  While they were here, they saw the day-to-day things that we did. They witnessed each thing being mislaid or not cleaned just as we did.  They lived in and contributed to the state of the house.

So, here’s the question: Why would we not all be ok with it starting like that?

This thought just struck me while I took down our wet water play clothes while climbing into the shower the other day.  Nobody minded the water play clothes dripping in the bathroom because they all participated in the event that caused the wet clothes.  But if they had arrived to dripping clothes in the bathroom, they might not have felt the same way about it.

And my hubby would say, “Why do you care, anyway?” because he doesn’t much care.  I probably shouldn’t, either.  I probably should be OK with things being “normal” when guests come so we don’t all stress and work ourselves silly before the guests arrive.  I think part of it is wanting them to feel welcome… but a wiped out hostess probably isn’t any more welcoming than a properly presentable house.

I’ve warned my local friends that I don’t keep a museum house.  If you want to come over to see my house, make an appointment, but if you want to come to see me and my family, just drop on by!

Maybe the normal state isn’t good enough for guests, even guests who didn’t come just to be entertained, but it’s good enough for us.  Why that difference exists, I can’t be sure.  What do you think?