Floor It!

There are a lot of uncertainties in life. You never know for sure if your favorite team will win the game. You're never quite sure if the weatherman is right. Sometimes you even doubt that your children will behave when you need it most. Some things, however, are guaranteed and gravity is one of those things.

Isaac Newton must not have had kids because if he had, he would have never needed a silly old apple tree to figure gravity out. All he really needed was a kitchen table. If he had kids, he could have simply looked at the floor after dinner and realized that it was dirty. Then he could have looked up at the ceiling and seen that it was clean. That in itself should have made the guy realize that everything fell down and not up.

It certainly works that way in my house. Another thing that's a guarantee in life is that a clean floor will always increase the effects of gravity beyond its normal capacity. Actually a freshly mopped floor will only increase the gravitational pull of certain objects like sticky liquids, butter, and white rice. Non-sticky objects, for some reason, are not affected by the clean floor phenomenon.

Apple juice is a classic offender. Once the kitchen floor is clean, apple juice is drawn to it by some inexplicable force. When a child witnesses an apple juice spill, he will inevitably make every effort to wipe up the mess with a dry towel and he will feel as if he succeeded. Parents, however, will discover the spill when they walk over the "clean" spot only to discover that their shoes have momentarily stuck to the floor. Upon removing the shoe from the sticky spot, it begins to stick to other parts of the floor, thus creating an even bigger mess, eventually requiring that at least 800 square feet of tile be re-mopped and dried at a minimum cost 45 minutes.

Another frequent victim of increased gravitational pull is white rice. Inevitably it ends up on the floor underneath 80% of the children's chairs. Have you ever tried sweeping up white rice? It sticks. I guess that's why they call it sticky rice. If you are lucky enough to get the rice to even move with a broom, it leaves a trail like that of a slug in its wake, thus requiring the aforementioned re-mop and requisite investment of time.

The best strategy for rice removal is the wait-it-out method. Using the wait-it-out method requires a lot of patience. To carry out this plan, one simply needs to wait about two hours for the rice to completely dry. Once it is dry it is easily swept sans slime trails. Of course, during those two hours of waiting, somewhere between 40 and 60% of the kids will step in the offending rice and track it around the rest of the tile, thus mandating a re-mop. You'll probably even find some in a bed the next morning resulting in an indicator that sheets need to be washed even though its not their scheduled day.

Other classic gravitational offenders include grape juice, butter (in the glass butter boat), cooking oil, and bread crumbs. No matter how hard a parent tries, these things will always find the floor in spectacular fashion.  Has anyone invented the Roomba mop yet?