It's Not the Crime, It's the Coverup (Babble)

My kids are very sweet.  They are polite, they play well together, and for the most part they are pretty easy.  For the most part.  But they are messy.  Hopelessly messy.

Now, truthfully, this probably just proves they are mine, because my mom could tell you stories of dishes left for weeks in my room and how seldom we ever saw my floor because it was covered in laundry and books and who knows what.  That’s fine.  I admit to my former slobbish ways.

But where’s the fun in parenting if you can’t enjoy a little hypocrisy learning from your past?  So I keep on my kids about picking up their rooms, at least enough that I can walk in there at night if I need to and not kill myself on something sharp.  Quinn’s room is just a giant dumping ground for toys most of the time, and although I don’t care too much I still occasionally pitch a fit and make them all help get everything off the floor.  But their rooms are their own space, and I only get upset when it’s getting downright dangerous.

The rest of the house, however, is another matter.  I don’t want to live in a pit. I can’t function when things get too messy in the space I use.  I can’t think in clutter.  I also don’t appreciate when my kids are careless and trash things that don’t belong to them.  They don’t mean to be disrespectful of our stuff, but they just don’t pay attention and it’s frustrating.

The family room where they watch T.V. and use their computer gets pretty bad.  They are not allowed to have food in there because it attracts ants, but we find plates and cups and crumbs in there anyway.  They know they are not supposed to leave a mess, but they knock over all the DVDs and don’t pick them back up.  They make projects while they watch their shows and leave scraps of paper and duct tape and crayons and scissors everywhere.  It looks terrible and drives us crazy.

When the kids blatantly break rules like that, they get a boring lecture, they get warnings, sometimes they get yelled at, they have gotten grounded, they’ve had privileges taken away….  They always seem genuinely sorry, they cry, they feel bad, they apologize, they try to make it better, and then they forget all of that and do it again the next day.  It’s baffling, a little insulting, and definitely annoying.  But it’s life with kids, and they do enough things right that the few things they do wrong are just not that important.

Recently we moved their laptop from the family room to the dining room in the hopes that it might be an easier place to keep clean.  We were wrong.  There have been several problems with letting the kids congregate in the dining room, but the worst one was the paint.

The rules about using paint in our house are pretty straightforward.  Tell us when you are using paint, paint stays in the kitchen, put it away when you are done and a parent will even help wash out bushes.  But for some reason that is still unclear to me, Aden brought a set of special (read ‘non-washable’) paints left over from a craft project into the dining room.  Also unclear to me is why Mona opened them.  But she did, and permanent white paint went all over.

It was an accident.  It was a particularly stupid accident, but still, Mona didn’t mean to do it.  We’d have been upset but not crazy upset.

The problem is, Mona was so worried about the idea of our getting mad that she decided it was better to hide the evidence than admit to the crime.  She threw a towel over the paint on the floor and sort of wiped up the white paint on the black leather chairs with her hands and I guess sat over it.  Aden and Quinn were in the dining room too and either didn’t notice the problem or just ignored it.  I’m not sure.  I was at work, and Ian called me to describe his discovery which I didn’t see until I got home.

What a mess.  There were little splatters of white paint on the china cabinet, paint smeared on the seats of two chairs, on top of the table (which we are smart enough to keep a pad on, so that’s something), on the edges of the table, on the floor…. We explained to Mona that if it hadn’t all dried onto everything it would have been a lot easier to fix.  She felt terrible, and it is as pointless to yell at Mona as it was to yell at the pet bunnies we used to have before we had kids, which is to say, you feel like a monster doing it and it doesn’t accomplish anything.  So I explained gently that one, no more paint in the dining room, and two, next time there is a mess she needs to tell us right away.

*Sigh*

Anyway, I was able to pick all the paint splatters off the woodwork with dental tools that I happen to keep in my shop (for getting into some odd violin crevices), the chairs will never look quite the same but they don’t look bad.  The floor was the worst because the solvent I used to get up the paint also took up the finish, so I had to find the polyurethane and reseal a large swath of hardwood.

Mona really did want to make amends, though, which I appreciated, so while I worked on the floor I had Mona make blueberry pancake batter.  She was sad at first because she likes to cook with me, not alone, but she was proud of herself for following the recipe correctly, and I told her she was being helpful because I couldn’t do both things at once but with her help I didn’t have to.

(My sweet, contrite Mona)

So the dining room is back to normal.  Aden wrote up a list of rules about using the computer in the dining room without trashing the place, so we’ll see how long they follow it.  The rules don’t look any different from the ones Ian and I came up with originally, but maybe since it’s in her own handwriting now maybe it will be easier for Aden to remember.  Hard to say.  (Now we can just get them to put their bikes away before it rains….)

Oh, styrofoam, how I hate thee, let me count the ways... (Babble)

Few things things are more annoying to clean up than styrofoam.  I’ll concede that anything emitted from a living creature’s body on a rug is worse, but there is definitely a circle of cleaning hell dedicated just to little staticky balls of weightless sponginess that make me want to scream.

Easily one of the biggest differences between children and adults is realizing the consequences of a mess.  I’m sure unrolling all the toilet paper is a blast.  It looks like a blast.  I have vague memories of it being a blast.  But I could never do it at this stage of my life because I’d be too aware the whole time that I was condemning either myself or someone else to cleaning it all up again.  Kids don’t think that far ahead, and they freely enjoy the simple bliss that is unwinding something that completely. I get it.  But I can’t go back there.  I still like a good mess on some level, just not a pointless one.  When I’m carving a violin and the floor gets covered in wood chips, I love it.  Sweeping up the wood chips is even fun because it’s evidence of progress.  But wasting toilet paper?  Not enjoyable.

There is no mess my kids find more irresistible than a styrofoam shredding extravaganza.  Not mud, not finger paint, not sand, not even the aforementioned toilet paper.  When they see a hunk of styrofoam they cannot stop themselves.  They pick at it and crumble it in their fingers until it’s nothing but tiny balls that stick to everything.  They laugh and smile and throw it about as if it’s snow, and the happier they are the more desperate I feel.
Styrofoam is like the escaped lunatic of the trash world.  It moves away from you as you try to snatch it up, and when you do catch it, it won’t leave your hands as you shake them fruitlessly over the garbage can.  It finds its own way back out of the trash sometimes and sticks to everything.  I actually tried to vacuum a bunch of it up the other night and it RAN AWAY.  I had to drop the attachment directly on top of the styrofoam before I could suck it up.  (It was a new vacuum that went promptly back to Target the next day because if it can’t help me with styrofoam it can’t keep the job.)

I realize that as far as big problems go, this not only does not make the list, but it doesn’t even rank high enough to sit in the same room as that list, but still….  I think I encounter more styrofoam than the average person so it comes up at a rate that feels intolerable some days.  Most of the boxes shipped to me at the violin store are full of peanuts.  At least when they are the kind that can be dissolved in water I have a project that keeps the kids entertained at the sink for a good hour or more, but the regular peanuts just wind up everywhere.  Those are annoying, but not as bad as the blocks of styrofoam that end up in a million pieces.

I think I hit my stryrofoam limit when there was suddenly so much of it at home.  With the new house there has been new furniture to assemble and things shipped to us from near and far, and all of it has come packaged in styrofoam.  I tell the kids not to touch any of the packing materials, but the foam blocks call to them with their squeaky siren song, and my children forget any promises they made and crumble the blocks into sticky blizzards.  Bits of styrofoam drift into every corner and cervice and peek out at me from behind bookcases and under the banister.  It gets on all our clothes and in our hair.  It’s worse than glitter (which also never goes away once it’s been set free), because it’s not even pretty.  At least spilled glitter twinkles.  Styrofoam just finds its way into dust bunny gangs and defiantly loiters around.  I appreciate the good job it did in making sure my new furniture arrived undamaged, but I still hate it.

And thus ends my styrofoam rant.  I need to go out and get a better vacuum….

UPDATE:
Okay, so right after I wrote this post, I was downstairs helping Aden practice violin, and through the glass door to the living room I see Quinn walking by with a crumbly chunk of styrofoam that he is busily shaking all over.  (I swear, I’m not even sure where he found it.  He must have been digging through the boxes piled up in the backyard that were headed for the dump the next day.)  He was covered, there was a trail through the living room into the dining room….  Aden ran ahead of me and came back saying solemnly, “Mom, don’t look in the kitchen.  Seriously, don’t look in the kitchen.  Or the family room.”  The epicenter was the loveseat in front of the TV, and you can see some of what I faced when I walked in, and then what was still under the couch.  You can’t see in the pictures how many teeny itty bitty bits there were everywhere, but between the rug, the pillows, the blankets, and the curtains, I had about one full episode of Law and Order’s worth of clean up.



*sigh*  —The money for that Dyson vac is sounding not so unreasonable right now.