Annie is home from school today, she had a bad cough yesterday and this morning but it has settled down by this afternoon and she moved from sick and happy to play quietly to bored and aggravating.
So I gave her two options
1. do your speech therapy homework
2. clean out your bedroom.
Guess which she chose?
Yes that is all of Annie’s belongings from her bedroom tipped out on my loungeroom floor.
Now Annie had helped me do the same thing to Heidi’s room earlier in the week so she had a fair idea what was about to happen. Toys were going to be sorted and culled, so were books and clothing.
Things were complicated by Annie’s tendency to hoard everything and anything, from empty wrappers saved for the precious barcode to old boxes holding a single piece of paper which embodies some precious memory, everything is kept. I tried to involve Annie in the sorting and culling process but she keeps wandering off, I’ve gotten to the stage now where I am just ruthlessly going through and doing it by myself. If nothing else Annie will learn that when Mummy says it is time to clean your room you damn well better be involved if you care about the end result.
And as friends who I have helped move house will attest, I am ruthless when it comes to cleaning, sorting and culling. Annie should know this by know as each year we do a big clean out and cull of our toys just before the madness of Christmas sees and influx of new toys.
Things I have noticed from cleaning Annie’s room, so far I have filled double the amount of rubbish bags that I did with Heidi’s room and I’m still only half way through. However I’m giving away far less of Annie’s clothing, toys and books because they can all be handed on to Heidi.
It was back in May that we turned our study into a bedroom for Annie and my husband, who it must be noted is a hoarder also, said he would finish cleaning out the wardrobe another day. That day never happened, so now I am cleaning all his things out and he will learn the same lesson as Annie is learning, if you leave it to me, I am ruthless.
I’ve also found dead (thankfully) cockroaches in Annie’s room. Something I did not find at all in Heidi’s room. I think this may relate to Annie’s hoarding of food wrappers.
And in good news we found her iPod which has been missing these many months. It was stuck between her wardrobe doors and could only be seen if you stood inside the empty wardrobe and closed the doors. So that will hopefully be a silver lining to the shock of mummy’s ruthless culling of stuff from the bedroom.
Now does anyone have some spare underbed storage boxes I could steal? Or does anyone want some pre-loved cloth pullups?
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