For the past several weeks (months?) I have been telling them to clean their room. They share a pretty small one, and have loft beds. I have been planning on what to get for them to organize their stuff with, so in their partial (very partial) defense, they don't have a LOT of storage or work space. That said....
They have not cleaned their room. They will go in to do so, and get distracted. Every time, and with little to no care about being able to find their stuff, since they mostly play imaginative games in which they cover paper after paper with scripts, screenplays, menus, lists, drawings, etc. Even when I've said "Just pick up your clothes", the job is wandered away from five minutes in. And apparently, I've just discovered, they have enough clothes to do a load of laundry every few weeks and be fine. The clean clothes are left in the basket to be pawed through when a shirt is needed, and the dirty clothes are...everywhere else.
Last week, I walked into their room and flipped out on them. Either they clean it, or they should be prepared to come home one day to an empty room. They rolled their eyes and slowly picked up a sock or two. I left the room, and said no more, already planning my evil room-clearing deed. I may have even chuckled a bit...
And sure enough, the room was not cleaned. Oh no, it wasn't even touched. If anything, the mess just got bigger.
The mess. You want to see it? Really? Because it's awful. Pictures don't even BEGIN to show how awful. But they can give the smallest hint of the chaos...
Please keep in mind that this is only one view, and actually shows very little of the DEPTH of the mess. Under all that? And in every other part of the room? Papers, drawings, little plastic toys, pens, markers, makeup, jewelry, TONS MORE PAPERS, books, toys, legos, pencils, pencils, pencils, art supplies, yarn, half-knitted projects, stickers, and tons more.
My original plan was to taken all their possessions that I knew they would actually want, and leave the clothes and trash for them to pick up to earn back the other stuff. However, after taking out FOUR BINS COMPLETELY FULL of stuff I was planning on giving back, this is still what the room looked like:
Clearly, something else had to be done. I wasn't sure they'd even NOTICE that anything had been removed! So I took it further.... I cleaned it for them. I piled all the clothes into a laundry hamper, and threw away the pile of trash. Here is a picture of the pile of papers I ended up with AFTER removing ANYTHING worth either keeping or taking to Goodwill:
I found three boxes full of dumdum wrappers. ( I had bought a bag for my son's 6th birthday pinata, then hadn't done a pinata, so the bag of a few hundred dumdums was left forgotten)
I took everything out except: Clothes, books, beds, violin music, the keyboard, a couple of things on their dressers, their CD player (which they don't use at the moment, but I didn't feel like lugging it out), and furniture. Taken was: all art supplies, dolls, blank books, journals, toys, other musical instruments, jewelry, makeup, dress up stuff, craft supplies, craft project both started and finished, art projects both started and finished, stuffed animals, dollhouse stuff, mementos, photos, barbies, EVERYTHING ELSE.
Here is what it looks like now:
I went through everything I took out, and already took about half of it to Goodwill. The rest is in bins in the garage. I haven't decided how I'm going to let them earn it back, or when. All I know is it will NOT be fun for them, and this will NOT happen again.
So there it is. My colossal parental failure of the last few weeks. I think I learned my lesson. I hope they do.
Now's where's my Vodka Cran? I'm ready to relax....
Lemon Drop, M.D.
