The Cleaning Olympics

Ready, set, go! Get to the finish line in a fun way while involving the whole family.

With Pesach bearing down upon us, it’s all hands on deck in the effort to clean the house from top to bottom. It can get stressful if we aren’t careful to keep the temperature cool and comfortable. If you want to get your gang involved, but don’t want to nag and beg and force, it can be helpful to turn cleaning into fun and games. I’ve come up with some ideas to help you get started. To be clear, these aren’t games that I have necessarily played with my own children. Most of them are ideas my kids and I thought up in honor of this article, and some are from back in the day when I was the kid helping my own mother, who was always full of great and creative ideas to make the great Pesach-cleaning adventure more exciting.

Of course, many of these are contrived and not necessarily helpful in getting things actually clean. The main ingredient in a stress-free and joyous Pesach-preparation experience is to model serenity and calm during this time and to allow that attitude to seep into your home, where your family will learn it by osmosis. Of course, that is easier said than done, so perhaps one or more of these ideas can help you get there.

Divide and Conquer

Use masking tape to divide a room into sections, one for each cleaner. The race is then on, as players compete to see who can finish their section first. The racemaster inspects each territory, and incomplete work must be redone, so speed can’t come at the expense of quality.

There are several variations to this game. You can have two people start at one end of a closet, room, or any other area, and work their way toward each other until they meet in the middle. Measure the ground each covered to determine a winner.

This next variation is not necessarily a race, but it’s something we enjoyed as children cleaning the playroom. Every person is seated in a different corner of the room and cannot get up from their area. They need to clean whatever they can reach. The toy baskets and bins are placed strategically around the room, and each player needs to throw the items in their section into the baskets where they belong, in other people’s sections.

Sponge Skating

My daughter told me this idea and doesn’t remember where she heard it from. If this is your genius invention, please let me know so I can give you credit! 

Sponge skating requires every member of the team to take off their shoes and socks and strap soapy sponges to their feet. They then skate around whichever floor you are cleaning at the moment, stopping periodically to dip their sponges in a bucket of soapy water. 

Clued In

The traditional treasure hunt has provided many hours of birthday and camp fun. Why not put it to use in getting your house cleaned for Pesach? Divide your family into two (or more!) teams. Determine which areas of the house you will target, and make up clues leading to those spaces. You will want to give each team a different set of destinations, so that you actually get those areas cleaned. 

You start off by giving each team a card with their first clue. Here’s an example of how it might play itself out:

Team A’s card says: 

When it’s time for Yanky to go shluffy,

His favorite pajamas are cozy and fluffy. 

Team A runs to Yanky’s pajama drawer. Sure enough, there is a card taped to the drawer. On one side of the card is the clue to the next destination. But before they can read and follow that, they first need to look at the other side of the card, which has directions. 

Empty out all of the pajamas. 

Find all of Yanky’s hidden nosh stash and discard. 

Wipe down the inside of the drawer thoroughly.

Shake out each item of pajamas and check any pockets.

Fold each pair neatly and return to drawer in an orderly pile. 

Turn over card for next clue.

Meanwhile, Team B has received a card that says:

Always lost but never far,

Where are the keys to Mommy’s car?

This leads them to the all-purpose drawer where Mommy keeps her keys. (Perhaps that’s why they are always lost, and Mommy can find a better spot for her keys.) 

There they find a card with instructions on cleaning the drawer and a clue to the next destination. 

And so the game goes on.

Both teams need to work quickly but thoroughly, and the last clue will lead them to the prize.

This can be:

The car—which will take them on a surprise trip to the pizza store for supper, as a reward for a job well done.

The freezer—where ice cream awaits. Or any spot where there is a yummy treat waiting for them.

The bookshelf—where you bought a new book for them.

Mommy’s room—where she is waiting to give all of her kinderlach a hug.

Or anything else you feel would be appropriate to reward your hard working teams! 

Relay Races

Speed is not exactly a positive factor in Pesach cleaning, where spots are missed in haste and a quick job often means a sloppy one, but bringing out the competitive side of your kids can definitely get them excited about cleaning. Aside from all of the ways you can contrive to get them to “see who can finish xyz first,” you can take it up a notch with cleaning relays. Here are some races you can do:

• Run to your team’s window, spray, wipe and run back, hand the spray and shmatta to the next person.
• Run to the book shelf, shake out a book, put it on the done pile, run back.
• Vacuum out a coat pocket from your team’s pile, then hand the nozzle to the next player (assuming you have two vacuum cleaners).
• Clean one piece of lego from the pile…
• Wipe down a chair… 
• Eat a chametz item… 
• Put a chametz package from the counter into the chametz box…
• Scrub one tile on the floor…

Treasure Chests

Make cleaning more fun by pretending to be pirates searching for treasure. If this is your style, you can really play it up dramatically, with you assuming the role of the pirate chief calling all pirates to the deck and letting them look through the telescope you made by connecting paper towel tubes. You will show them the target ships through the telescope and assign each junior pirate a mission. Depending on the nature of the room you are working on, each toy bin or closet shelf or drawer can be a different ship that they must plunder. Of course, don’t forget to wear your eye patch. 

There are other variations you can play as well. You can hide actual prizes or candies in the area that is to be cleaned that day, so that they do find treasure, but of course, the ultimate treasure is a piece of real chametz. 

You can give points for every piece of chametz a kid finds, which can then be redeemed for privileges and prizes. 

Auction House

While we’re searching for things, don’t forget the thrill of finding money that has settled in all the nooks and crannies of the home. As a kid, any coins or dollar bills we found while cleaning was ours to keep. (If I remember correctly. And if that’s the case, I can only imagine one smart aleck saying, “I’ll volunteer to clean your wallet.”) That in itself makes the prospect of cleaning a little more exciting. But you can take it a step further. You can then have an auction, where children bid on prizes with the money they have found. If you don’t want to give prizes, they can even bid on Pesach-cleaning privileges. 

Or, you can do like my friend did and supplement the cash stash with money that you hide deliberately. In her words: “I hid six dollars worth of coins in their bedrooms and in a day all three rooms were cleaned for Pesach.” 

Examples of Pesach cleaning privileges are:

• Staying up an hour past bedtime to clean
• Cleaning something together with Mommy, only the two of you
• Any actual jobs that are a drop more desirable than other ones
• First pick of any item from the chametz box
• Going with Mommy or Totty on a Pesach shopping trip
• Supervisor for a day/minute/hour

Imagination Station

Aside from the pirates searching for treasure in the deep blue yonder, there are many other opportunities to use your imagination in getting the house clean, depending on the ages and stages, and even genders, of your children. You can be detectives in search of a suspect, searching every room for clues and picking up fingerprints off each piece of evidence. You can be princesses who need to complete a certain mission in order to be able to get your throne back from the enemies. 

When we were kids, my mother would dump a lot of the toys in the bathtub with soapy water and we would clean them all off. Just doing that was a lot of fun! But you can add to it by dumping your little ones in the bath with the toys and pretending that all of the toys are little fish that need to quickly be cleaned up and thrown out of the tub before the big, bad shark comes to eat them. 

Dance Off

If you’ve sent children to preschool, you’ve surely seen some version or other of the chametz dance. Take it up a notch by having each child come up with an original chametz dance. (That’s the shake that you do before leaving the table during that period of time when we’re still eating chametz but half the house is Pesach cleaned.)

The winner of the best dance gets to have their choreography designated as the official family chametz dance. 

Singalong

Everything is more fun with music. Why stop at blaring the music to get you all in the spirit of cleaning with joy? How about coming up with some original songs that you can sing while cleaning?

Here are a couple of mine, off the cuff:

Throw, throw, throw your chametz, throw it out the door,

Pesach will be here real soon, we don’t want it anymore. 

(TTTO Row, row, row your boat.)

Upstairs, downstairs, all around the house,

Pesach is coming soon.

We thank Hashem in heaven

And get rid of all the leaven,

So join us and grab yourself a broom!

(TTTO Uncle Moishy’s Uptown, Downtown)

You can turn it into a competition with everyone making up their own song and, like the dance, choosing a special family cleaning anthem.  

Photo Challenge

This is a game for those with older children. Over the course of a day, week, or any unit of time you choose, family members are given various areas of the house to clean. They take a camera with them and take some close up pictures of various corners and crevices of your home (under the kitchen table, the little space in between the cabinet and the ceiling, inside Chaim’s bekeshe pocket, etc.).  At the end of the designated time, you can either develop the photos or pull them up on a computer screen. Everyone has to guess where in the house the picture was taken. 

Scavenger Hunt

While, of course, the whole purpose of Pesach cleaning is to find and get rid of chametz, spice things up a bit by giving each child a list of items to find while they are cleaning. At the end of the day, the family gathers and each member displays their finds. Here are some examples that you can include in your scavenger hunt:

• Find a UFO (unidentified food object).
• Find something that comes in handy on Pesach.
• Find something that has been here since last Pesach.
• Find something that has to do with one of the makkos.
• Find something that has the same initials as you.
• Find a piece of chametz that does not belong where it is.
• Find something you never knew we had.
• Find something that will make everyone smile or laugh.
• Find something you would want to give to Pharaoh if he were alive today.
• Find something that helped us get through COVID lockdown.
• Find something that can help bring Mashiach closer.

I hope you can use at least one of these ideas to lighten things up, and I hope you have a happy and fun Pesach-cleaning season!

An earlier version of this article originally appeared in The Lakewood Shopper.