If you have little ones in the house I'm not going to be telling you anything new: they hide things in strange places. If an adult takes a snack and can't finish it, he/she usually takes it back to the kitchen to put away for another time. Not so the munchkins among us. They seem to take delight in finding a "safe place" to store their edible treasures, particularly if they don't want their brothers or sisters to find them. Sometimes this is deliberate and sometimes they just put away their edibles wherever they happen to find themselves.
There's a lot of talk that some of the things that we clean for Pesach have nothing to do with making Pesach and everything to do with obsessive Spring Cleaning. A commentor elsewhere said: "Dust is not chometz." Well, he was right, and he was wrong. If you have munchkins in the house then he was for sure wrong.
Scene: many years back and I am preparing to turn and vacuum out all the mattresses in the house. I know, I know--nothing to do with being kosher for Pesach. Except.....in our room, between the mattress and the box springs my grumbling husband, commandeered into helping me, discovered a stash of Cheerios. No, I'm not a secret Cheerios addict. But that space was just the right height for one of my little ones who, in passing by, put away a stash for later. And yes, we found similar stashes between two other sets of mattresses.
Over the years I have found cookies squirreled away in desk and dresser drawers, and pretzel sticks tucked in between the towels in the linen closet. I have found stray cookies in kids' coat pockets. And yes, I once found a complete lunch that one child obviously didn't like and didn't eat tucked high up on a shelf. Please don't even ask what kind of chometz horrors came to light when I dismantled the couch to vacuum it out.
Yes, as the kids grew older it got somewhat better. But when a seasoned balabusta says it's time to vacuum out the mattresses before Pesach, you might want to lay off the "You don't have to do that" advice, especially if there are munchkins in the house.
5 comments:
Those munchkins are precisely why my grandchildren are not allowed into my house between Purim and Pesach, and why my married kids come to me for Pesach.
Maybe I'm wrong, but doesn't selling the chametz and saying kol chamira take care of situations like this? I think even if you found the chometz on Pesach it wouldn't be a problem.
a) it would be a problem if someone ate it, even by accident
b) I'm told that if there is chametz but it's NOT going to get into your food (let's say it's behind a piece of furniture that can't be moved easity), it IS taken care of by the bitul chametz. For years I had a refrigerator that was too difficult to move. I knew there were Cheerios back there, but they were batel. And we don't even sell chametz.
My husband was joking (at least I hope he was) that if you want a really kosher Pesach you have to sell the little kids with the chometz. If you keep them you are never going to get rid of all the chometz. I guess whoever wrote the Kol Chamirah had experience in trying to make a home kosher for Pesach that is filled with little children.
my Rav says, "Cheerios were invented so that you'll know whether you did a good enough job cleaning for Pesach" -- if you still find Cheerios, get back to work. He also says not to do spring cleaning, not to sort things, not to move heavy appliances... but if you have small children, "Daven hard, and then clean EVERYTHING."
Post a Comment