Every once in awhile it all gets to be too much for me. The crying, the screaming, the whining, the demanding. My pulse starts to race and then I look around my house and in addition to the overwhelming noise, all I SEE is chaos. Stuff everywhere. Nothing in the right place. Everything a mess. And I wonder “how the f* did this happen?” and then my frustration turns towards fury, and it happens: I become a tornado.
I don’t become a tornado in the wrathful, angry, destructive, or scary sense but more in the “nothing in my path is safe” type of way and I go into a tidying frenzy. Usually my cleaning cyclone ad urge to organize and tidy initiates in the playroom and my fury befalls my sweet little girls with a “GO CLEAN YOUR PLAYROOM NOW!” command. Usually while they clean up their stuff I tidy up my own spaces but after Halloween last week, it just got to be too much for me.
As I was frantically searching for a crown for Honeybun to wear Trick-or-Treating, I realized how my children’s’ previous “cleaning up” involved throwing toys wherever rather than putting them in the correct place (I’m particular about were toys go, see “Taming the Playroom”) and I told Honeybun right then and there after school the next day was going to be time to clean up the playroom.
So while Grandpa went to get Honeybun from school, Sugarplum and I prepared the playroom for a full overhaul and this is what we ended up with:
I took all the labeled bins off the shelves and put all the toys that “needed a home” on the floor next to the bins which included all the baskets, purses and pumpkins filled with miscellaneous nonsense. I then went through each bin and removed all the bits that didn’t belong in that bin and added them to the pile and had the girls put everything away in the right bin.
It was slow going (Sugarplum took about 15 minutes telling me what she was going to play with when we were done cleaning before actually starting to put things away) but it didn’t take nearly as long as I expected. I had set the oven timer to buzz at 3 pm, which is the girls’ normal nap time, giving them 47 minutes to get it done. I told them if they got done quicker they could play until the timer buzzed. We were putting the bins back on the shelves when the buzzer went off.
Since our cleaning spree nearly a week ago, they playroom has stayed miraculously clean (other than a bin that broke and fell on its own during breakfast a few days ago). Now if I only I had the time, energy, patience and desire to “mom-nado” the rest of the house…
