Tag: #Organizing

  • Cleaning Lesson

    We did a big clean this weekend. We cleaned the apartment; every room except the study. My task was to clean the bathroom and the kitchen. My wife took on the role of cleaning our daughter’s room.

    We always debate cleaning the kid’s room. Such as, should we do it and get it in a proper order, or should we take the time to show the kid how to clean her room, then have her do it. Now, she is six, so there is a limit of organizational skill that she has, so we can only expect so much. What we have continued to choose to do is give her room a big clean every month, and then the rest of the time, ask the kid to clean it knowing that she is just shoving things under her bed.

    Now, we have a small apartment, and I think most of you know that, so there is only so much room for so much stuff. If something comes into the apartment, then something has to move out. This is especially true for the kid. We know that starting with October, she will start acquiring things; Halloween things, Thanksgiving things, Christmas things, and then birthday things. And all of these things need to have a place in her room. It’s purge and replace.

    The lesson here is that we need to live with less things. That is what we need to teach the kid, right? Or is the lesson that everything should have a place to live? Or is the lesson we need a bigger place to live?

    Either way, apartment is clean. Well, except for the study.

  • Parenting: Organizing Nature/Nurture

    I’m pretty tired from the weekend, and I didn’t sleep well, come to think of it. (To really “come to think of it” I haven’t slept well in three years.) It was too cold to do things outside this weekend, so we were all stuck in the apartment together. We decided to deep clean the apartment, and finish the ongoing project of organizing the kid’s room. We hung more book shelves in her room, since I can’t stop buying her books, and got lots of bins for the kid to put her toys in. This is all in an effort to make her small space more efficient, and to also make it easier for her to clean up her room. As that seems to be a constant battle; cleaning the room!

    On weekends like this, I start thinking about nature/nurture when it comes to the kid. How will this cleaning, and organizing affect her? Will having a room with white bins of different sizes, labeled, cause her to be an organized person? Will she rebel against organization in adolescence? Will this cause her to flourish in analytical endeavors, or crush her creativity?

    My parents were very organized people; Scheduled and regimented. To this day, at 77, my father keeps a schedule for each day, of things to accomplish. I never felt that my folks pushed “order” on me, but I can clearly say that I rebelled against anything that had any order to it in my teens and twenties. I hated patterns, and well, anything scheduled and consistent. Only when I started my professional career in my 30’s, that this inclination to be orderly and organized became an advantage. Now in my 40’s, I can’t stop organizing and scheduling.

    So, as I look at my kid, I wonder how this will play out, or if it ever plays out; does putting things in a box matter?