I'm not foolish enough to think that my 10 year old has the messiest room in the world. I'm sure there are worse. For the past year I have taken the "close the door and don't think about it" approach figuring that she will tire of her squalor. Guess what? Not so much. This morning I ate my Wheaties and put her in charge of the 2 year old in the living room and dove in. 2 bags of trash, 3 huge donation bags and 2 big boxes of stuff to hand down to lil' sister and I'm STILL not done. After 4 hours of work, I'm not done. I can clean my entire house in 2 hours. I have sorted though every piece of 4th grade detritus imaginable. I have tested markers and thrown out dried out ones, waded through piles of curly-qued pipe cleaners and origami whatevers, found a fortune in foreign coins (thanks, dear mother in law - just what we needed ... money we can't spend until we head to France). I should have done it while she was at camp ... I doubt my heart would have ached quite so much for her mere presence. I did try it for 15 minutes with her helping but let me tell ya ... I don't know what that was but it sho' wasn't help. The yelps of pain as I put an item in the donate bag or, God forbid, the trash. More than I can bear. What's left now I should be able to do at night while she is sleeping in my bed. This morning's work involved a lot of noise that would wake up my lil' princess and the pea, Sadie - such a light sleeper. I'm determined to get it done especially since I uber-nagged David to assemble the new bookshelf for her room declaring it the lynchpin of the entire clean up. Pretty sure the marriage would have been in question had the bookshelf remained in the hallway where he left it on Sunday. Oh well ... I would post pics but the shame spiral is pretty huge on this one. It really was a mess to inspire a Shel Silverstein poem.
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