That’s not a typo that’s how I feel after two days of devoting myself to the condition of my kids’ rooms. I’ve also completed #1 on my Top Ten Most Hated Jobs of Momhood - Switching out the kids’ clothes for the season. Double Ugh!
As you know, we’ve completed our recent remodeling. Of course, we didn’t quite finish that job before we jumped off the cliff of adoption paperwork while moving back into our house from the in-laws. To say that the upstairs looked like Goodwill blew up after being hit by a cyclone is not exaggerating. And in addition to the rest of the chaos, my kids all chose this time to outgrow almost everything, especially their shoes.
This just meant a trip to the Upstairs Mall since I’ve been blessed with hand-me-downs. At some point before four kids I used to be semi-organized and kept all those blessings in totes organized by sex and size....and believe it or not, the contents used to even MATCH THE LABELS. Truly it was a thing of beauty...but (unfortunately) not a joy forever. Those were the days, my friend. But...somewhere along the way the system crashed. I now find those labels more of a possibility than an actuality. A rubber room looks pretty tempting when I discover the size seven jeans that I searched for in vain last fall in a tote of size eights. Plus I have little helpers that get excited by the new Scooby Doo t-shirt they spot somewhere in a pile and pretty soon those carefully sorted and organized piles have toppled, chaos ensues, and mom is having to be talked down off the ledge.
Since ALL the paperwork on our end is done for the homestudy(dossier yet to come) I could no longer dodge the disaster zone of the upstairs. I started in Davis’s room. Now I do regularly have my kids clean their rooms, almost daily in fact. I discovered that Davis’s idea of cleaning consists of putting out of sight whatever is out in the open. Not where things belong, mind you, but out of sight. This means that every nook and cranny of his room held a handful of: legos, duplos, trash, change, mini-tractors, crayons, plastic animals, etc. His toy box held books and dirty laundry. Do you know how long it takes to sort out handfuls of whatnot from 236 crevices in a kid’s room? Even his mega-watt smile dimmed when I made him help me with that tornado zone.
Jamison is a collector. His room wasn’t too bad....except for all the collections: rocks(otherwise known as parking lot gravel), the cardboard corners from the kitchen cabinet delivery (?!?), twenty-four 6x6 green foam pieces (six for each kid to make boats out of this summer), kleenex boxes, and crayons and legos. Our marriage may start to suffer if Kenton doesn’t stop GIVING the kids all the flotsam they want. Although he refused, much to their dismay, to let them take anything off the truckload that sold for scrap the other day.
The girls’ room is mostly neat. They didn’t get it from me. I have this sneaking hunch that their teenage years will be filled with complaints about my housekeeping inabilities. However, they are a couple of packrats. Oh, my! We could open our own Goodwill with the number of purses, stuffed animals, dolls, and dress-ups that they have.
All those odds-n-ends had to go somewhere....
the black hole that is our bedroom. I'm heading for bed now. If you don't hear from us you know where to send the search party.
Ah, I know the feeling...Davis sounds like Rachel and Jamison sounds like Emma. Imagine the combo in one room. I am about ready to do one of those major room make-overs where someone else goes in organizes and throws away all the junk. Someone else meaning Mom.
ReplyDeleteUnfortunately for us, the only neat and organized one is Abby and she shares a room with a "messy"..and the others are all "messies" too!! My plan is to either take a leaf blower and blow all the stuff out if there, or threaten humiliation if it isn't clean the first day of summerbreak. I'm with ya Momster!!
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