Carpet country

It’s carpet season, and we are on the hunt for the finest carpet in the land.
Our current carpet was originally installed when we first moved in, when our daughter was a baby. She’s 8 now, and she has a 5-year-old brother. Combine three dogs and one cat (7 years, 8 years, 3 years and 8 years, respectively, in the house), and that adds up to 39 years of carpet nastiness.
Now, don’t get me wrong. We have tried to keep our carpet clean. We vacuum it. We have had it professionally cleaned. We even encouraged the kids NOT to grind Pop-Tarts into it.
I know what you are thinking. You are thinking that the first rule should be NO FOOD UPSTAIRS! And I agree. Because that rule is there. Food is not allowed upstairs. Or in the van.
Slight problem: You have to actually enforce the rules. And the kids don’t even have to try to weasel around the rules. It goes like this:
MONDAY: The week always starts off easy. Lunches were made the night before, and school clothes were set out. The kids ask to have some Corn Pops upstairs. “Oh, kids, you know there’s no food upstairs!” And the whole family chuckles together. I am pretty sure this scene is shot in black and white.
TUESDAY: The wheels have come off. While trying to find a matching hair band and the other shoe as well as figure out how someone could lose a bright yellow Transformers lunch box – IT’S BRIGHT YELLOW! – you and your spouse are busy running laps past each other saying things like, “Well, you drove the car home, so the keys HAVE to be here somewhere” and “I thought YOU were taking her to the orthodontist.” At that point, one of the kids asks if they can have Corn Pops upstairs. They could have asked if they could use the power drill on the computer, as the answer would have still been, “Whatever, where are the keys/hair band/lunch box?”
And so the food rule is broken. Same thing happens in the van. You are on your way to school – awesomely on time for a change – when you put your child in the car and hear, “Daddy, I’m hungry.” Then it occurs to you that, as a parent, breakfast would be a nice addition for your child. So you convince yourself that Pop-Tarts are practically fruit salad, whip one in the back seat, and pick out the crunchy remnants a week later.
So over time, carpets can get nasty. Ours has reached that point. My wife decided that she would embark on the carpet quest alone, as she knew I would be zero help.
HER: Do you like this style?
ME: Sure.
HER: How about this one?
ME: Sure.
HER: This one?
ME: Sure.
HER: I just showed you a baloney sandwich.
ME: Sure.
Fortunately, she knows that, when I tell her I really don’t care, I do mean I really will be OK with whatever her pick is. I also am worthless with colors. It’s not that I’m colorblind. But I am definitely color indifferent. Case in point: I am still pretty sure our first house was gray. My wife has shown me pictures in which it is very clearly tan. Yet I still remember it as gray. So when she brought home a selection of different color samples, you can guess how helpful I was. It was especially confusing since they all appeared tan to me, meaning I had to wonder if my wife was getting gray carpet, since they are apparently interchangeable.
As we move forward with the carpet process, we are in the one phase that is actually a part I am liking: The purging. This is where you go through every room, and put every thing in it in a big black trash bag to throw out. Then, you wait until your wife comes in and says, “Uh, we are not starting from scratch, and also I am pretty sure that one bag has the cat in it.”
But we are going room to room and seeing what things can be relocated to a different home (namely a landfill home). We are also finding some things that we have not seen in ages. I am not sure why one of my favorite T-shirts was wedged behind a Harry Potter book in the playroom, but it’s great to have Ol’ Blue back in play.
So in a few weeks, the process will be complete. It will be nice to have clean, crisp new flooring, and I am sure we will work hard to keep the food downstairs. After all, we want to preserve its original color of tan. Or gray.