The Aerie
For years I've been threatening my boys in order to get them to clean
up their room. They are eight and eleven right now, so I understand
that cleanliness is for the oldest a challenge, and for the youngest
an impossibility. But one of the compelling threats has long been
this:
"Clean your room, or one of these days I'm going to clean it with a
snow shovel."
And it worked, to various extents, from time to time. However, as of
last week their room was, well, it was just a pit. An amalgam of
garbage, laundry, and toys that was quickly hardening into some kind
of new geomorphic stone.
"Ladatite," a sedementary rock formed by layers of dirty clothes,
toys, and post-Easter candy wrappers. Notable for a smell worse than
that of sulfur when burned. See also: comicalite, laundryroomalite,
and underbedatite.
Finally, this weekend, in the spirit of Spring Cleaning, I made good
on my threat: I walked into their room with a box full of garden-size
trash bags and an orange snow shovel, and set to work.
By the time I was done shovelling, about four hours later, I had half
a dozen garbage bags full of stuff, and two dozen full plastic bins of
the variety so mistakenly named "organizers". With few exceptions, I
made no attempt to separate or sort anything before it went into the
bags and crates. Just filled them up and dumped them in the living
room in a pile that eventually reached five feet in height.
Then I started sorting. Oh, the boys helped with some of this, to be
sure. I wasn't about to just slave away on their behalf while they
played and gamboled carelessly about. But they aren't capable of the
kind of ridiculous excesses to which I am able to extend myself on a
project like this. I sorted out bins of K'Nex, Zoobs, Hot Wheels, and
Playskool toys. The Legos box alone is two cubic feet, full of little
plastic pieces. I sorted out dirty laundry into two large baskets. I
sorted out bundle after bundle of pens and pencils. I sorted out the
miscellaneous toys, and tried to collect pieces of disassociated toys
to re-associate them. I sorted in the afternoon, I sorted in the
evening, and I sorted at night. To keep myself entertained, I put in
the "X-Men 1.5" DVD from Blockbuster and watched the movie with all
the director's edits, as well as all of the production tracks on the
second DVD.
I sorted these toys until 4:30 in the morning.
At one point I had one of those lovely moments: I was climbing through
the piles, making my way back to the Sorting Chair, when I put my bare
foot down and felt an excruciating pain in my heel. Narrowly avoiding
planting my face in the side of my wife's heirloom upright piano, I
collapsed into the chair and looked down to see what I'd crushed.
The small fabric pouch on the floor was labelled with one word:
"Jacks."
Eighteen hours after I started, I had the toys somewhat organized.
Then I threw out all the broken toys and garbage, dumped the laundry
in the laundry room, and set aside the two boxes of toys that I had
determined were likely to be ones that the boys wouldn't mind selling
at a garage sale.
Finally I headed off to sleep.
My youngest boy has an amazing supernatural power. He can tell when
I've gone to sleep. Since he was old enough to walk, he has been
waiting until I've fallen asleep, then coming up and climbing into bed
with us. When he was little it was sort of cute. As he got older it
got more annoying. Now that he's a bony bag of elbows and knees, I am
thoroughly tired of it.
And he never comes up until I've gone to bed. If I'm up reading until
1:30 in the morning, he doesn't try to come upstairs. Only a handful
of times in five or six years has he come upstairs while I was still
awake.
So last night (er, this morning) he came up stairs right at 4:50. I
had juuuuuuuuuust fallen asleep, and the squeak of the floorboards
woke me up. He climbed into bed with us, and having just had a twenty
minute nap, I could not fall back asleep. And I was hungry. And
annoyed.
It took a snack and an apparently endless period of time, but as the
sky was starting to turn light and the birds began their incessant
morning chirping, I finally fell asleep about 5:30 or so.
I have no illusions. By this time next week, a new layer of ladatite
will doubtless be forming in their room. Such is the doom of the
parent...
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Posted by Albatross at April 27, 2003 12:00 AM