3 Days and One Aching Back

3 days; it took 3 days to clean my son's room, but it's done. For the moment, anyway. My children are slobs. (They get it from their dad, although I'm obligated to mention that he did fold at least 5 baskets of laundry over the weekend. And worked on the kitchen. I love that man.) They all 3 live in absolute pigsties and seem to like it that way and yes, I realize I'm an enabler because I don't have the energy to keep after them to clean everything up on a regular basis. I know there are some moms who are good about daily clean ups and so forth but I'm not one of them so the messes get out of hand and they get overwhelmed, then forget it. Part of the problem is an excess of toys, especially the toys with a zillion small parts, which are a nightmare to clean up. Most of the time I was working in his room was spent sorting. There's just no other realistic way to do it, though. He has a huge toy box but it doesn't hold everything, and even if it did when it's all piled together he can't play with, say, Legos because he can't find enough of them to make anything.

I actually took a garden rake in there at one point to gather everything into one pile to make it easier to sit in one spot and sort. I'm happy I was able to get things organized, though. I took away a whole container full of Little People toys, much to the dismay of both The Youngest, aka The Wild Child, and The Middle Child. They don't play with them anymore, which I know because most of them were among the only toys still put away, and I'll use them as a bargaining chip. (They can have them back if they keep their rooms clean for x amount of time. They'll forget about them then I can ship them off to Goodwill in a couple of months.) That container is now holding a Geo Trax set. Some of his containers were broken and several new toys didn't even have a place to go to begin with so I got that all straightened out. Luckily there were some spare containers which I've now put to good use and everything has a place to go. At final count, I got rid of about 6 bags of trash and two contractor sized trash bags to go to Goodwill, and probably another 3 or 4 loads of laundry from all the dirty clothes he had laying around his room. All in all, I'm happy it's done even though I know it won't last.

I went into The Middle Child's room and did the same thing a month or so ago, only I didn't finish up and left one teeny tiny little pile of toys to sort in the middle of the floor, one innocent little almost done baby pile I was sure The Middle Child could handle, and the next time I looked in her room it was as if I hadn't touched it. I think she dumped almost every single toy container out again; ARGH!!!