Learning To Have Fun, The Toddler Way

"It is fun to have fun, but you have to know how!" - Dr. Seuss

Our house is a mess... But, as anyone with a toddler knows, that is life. There are toys and clothes and books and DVDs strewn across the living room and it's like trying to manuever through an obstacle course or running the gauntlet. With every step you take you hold your breath and pray that you don't impale yourself with a straw sippy cup or peirce your big toe on a Smurf. This is like living on an alient planet as I am an organized person, everything has a place and every place has a thing! I have never been a friend to clutter so the state of our house used to cause me to lose sleep. I am trying to become more tolerant of the mess though, maybe I need to find some sort of 12 step program? Organizers Anonymous maybe?

So this weekend I made it my mission to at least go through Brianne's closet and drawers and purge the clothes she has outgrown and put away all the clean laundry she can actually wear. Brianne wanted to help me. She loves helping Mommy and Daddy these days. She can't rest until she has thrown away her dirty diaper after I change her. Anyway, Bri was very helpful in emptying her drawers of old clothes. All I had to do was open one drawer and I suddenly found myself in a tornado of clothes! She had flung out every item of clothing in the first drawer in a frenzied 3.9 seconds and then was on the next one! Before I knew it all drawers were empty and we werere standing in a one foot pile of baby clothes. Great, that was easy!

However, when it came time to fold the clothes in the basket and put them away, she disagreed with my technique. I was being much too reserved with the folding and stacking and color coordinating. She showed me that the most efficient method was to grab the clothes by the arm load and cram them all into a single drawer. Aha! Epiphany! I have been doing it wrong all this time! A chore that I thought would take all day only took us 10 minutes, and it wasn't a chore at all! We were done with work and play could be begin, even though Brianne made the work into play. (I did of course go back later and fold the clothes and organize, color coordinate, and stack them neatly in the drawers...)

And when we were all done, Brianne showed me that laundry baskets make great forts to!