What I Cleaned in July

I am kind of getting tired of 1) cleaning and 2) writing about it.  But still I persist.

In July I cleaned the boys' room.  Nothing too exciting.  It always is an interesting look into their lives and personalities when we delve deep though.

Braeden is maybe my most sentimental child.  He saves a lot of things that are meaningful to him.  The wonderful thing about him though is that he's getting old enough to discern what is meaningful and is willing to let things go.  Letting go of things is an integral part of cleaning.  Vital.

What Braeden lacks is a good sense of how to organize his treasures, most of which are papers...he loves to draw maps of imaginary lands.

(I don't quite get it.)

I handed him file folders and he acted like I'd handed him the world.  He said, "Thanks SO MUCH," and "This is PERFECT."  He was happy with his neat magazine box full of files.

And so was I.

Mark is less sentimental but perhaps more of a hoarder.  He hoards Lego instructions and boxes.  He has stacks and stacks of instructions...each more valuable to him than the last.  Our Legos are a jumble and not kept in a way where you have all the original pieces together with the original directions...I shun such blocks to creativity.  Mark truly uses the instructions though.  He pores over them.  He learns about construction.  They give him ideas.  He discovers how to make things more stable.

(I don't quite get it.)

And then there's the boxes.  He insists that he needs the boxes.  They include pictures of Lego sets Mark doesn't have.  He studies the pictures and then tries to recreate them.  It seems he would much rather create something based on a picture than the mere directions.  So I cut the boxes, carefully saving the flat pieces in a stack.  I put one size of direction booklets in a box and the rest in a magazine box and he was happy.

And so was I.

My boys aren't going to have a constantly neat and tidy room.  They aren't.  And I'm OK with that.  Because the trade-off is enterprising boys, flexing their imagination and creativity.

And that isn't always neat and tidy.

Speaking of my boys, here are some videos shot from Adam's phone of them bowling (assuming I can make it work).   They make me laugh.