Today I moved the couch. It’s a heavy couch, but the Christmas tree will not fit in my very small living room unless the ginormous sectional gets moved. There’s barely room to walk from the front door to the kitchen now, but at least there’s a bit of space for a small and skinny Charlie Brown Christmas Tree.
I’m normally against decorating for Christmas until after Thanksgiving. I love Thanksgiving. Let’s honor it as the holiday that it is, as well as honor its secondary job, which is to usher in Christmas. However, I’m in the holiday mood already this year and may break my long-held rule about decorating before the Day of Thanks. It doesn’t help that Thanksgiving falls later in the month. We also seem to have busy plans every spare moment, so I feel a need to get started earlier before the calendar consumes me.
So I moved the couch. That’s a start. That at least lets everyone in my family know that decorating is coming.
My elementary-aged children got very excited about a couch move. They even helped push with all their might, while I pulled. It means Christmas is coming!
This might seem like the beginnings of a Christmas story. It is not. It is the beginning of a story about the scary things that live under the couch.
Everyone should move their couch occasionally just to find what all is underneath it. In fact, in order to move the couch, I also had to move an end table. End tables occasionally need to be moved, as well.
Perhaps you already know what is under your couch. This is a very good sign that you do not have any children in your home on a regular basis, particularly small children.
Halloween may now be over, but it was more of a scary scene in my living room today than a Christmas one. There was a lot of mysteries and terrifying moments. I wasn’t sure if I was picking up the remains of a dead bug or a piece of dismantled candy. I wasn’t sure if the misshapen brown … thing… that had obviously dried up was formerly playdough, some old chocolate or perhaps something far more sinister. Was it growing hair or had it picked up fuzz from the carpet? My mind can go to all kinds of places.
The amount of food not in wrappers and wrappers not holding food was overwhelming. I picked up at least half a box of cereal from the floor. Do you know how difficult it is to get up all of the tiny flakes of Fruity Pebbles that are hiding in every crevice and crack of your couch and the carpet?
The last holiday was particularly brutal on the hidden recesses under my couch. I believe my kids confuse the couch with the trash can. They probably think because we can’t see under the couch, that if they put their trash there, nobody will know. They are correct. There were empty candy wrappers and leftover Halloween candy (not necessarily from this year) all hiding under my couch. In fact, even as I type this I wonder if I should confess it, my daughter found a piece of Easter candy. It was in the shape of an egg, so it cannot be ignored that it was from this (or another) spring. The good news is that if an animal has also been living under there, it definitely didn’t starve. I have no sign of an animal, but I’m not saying it isn’t completely improbable either.
I also found random game pieces, which is why we can never play a family game together. None of the pieces are ever in the box where they began. Now I know why; they are in the couch, or under the couch, instead.
It’s a good thing I moved the couch. A large number of socks missing their mates can now be reunited. My spoons can now rejoin their siblings in the drawer by the sink after months of us all wondering how they could just walk off. We have been eating cereal with forks for months now, and that’s hard to do. Also important, at least for a short time, I now have the empty container in the kitchen full of working pens. That won’t last long, but at least it’s restocked from the living room floor for the time being. I also found a glove I’ve been missing since last winter.
The problem is that, when I clean up the floor, I see a small black piece of plastic that appears broken and needs to be in the trash. My KIDS however see a priceless jewel that goes on their “favorite” toy and that daddy will for SURE be able to “fix.” He will never fix it and that small item will sit in a pile with other broken toys waiting to be “fixed” and they will all remain on the far end of the kitchen counter backed up to the refrigerator where everybody forgets it’s there. Until the day I clean everything off and throw it all away. It never fails that’s about 7 hours before everybody remembers the pile, and the broken item, and it’s needed RIGHT THAT SECOND.
I will probably remove the thing from the trashcan and back into the broken toy section of the counter. It will stay in the pile waiting to be loved again until someone puts it back under the couch where it will wait for me until next year when I move the couch again.
If you haven’t looked under your furniture in a while, it may be time to rearrange. Don’t give strange critters a chance to settle in out of sight, eating the chocolate that your kids feed them. You never know what’s under there.
It might be time to move your couch.
