I just spent the past 3 hours (minus about 20 minutes for an attack of the vapours) cleaning #4’s room. Someone in my family (who shall remain nameless) had the brilliant, BRILLIANT idea to give the boy a ream of paper for Christmas. Sounds strange? Not really, if you consider that #4 is a born aeronautical engineer, and can make amazing paper airplanes. ones that actully fly really well, and are funky and interesting. Except that, he loves doing it, and cannot throw away any paper airplane that he’s made. He’d rather just walk all over them or wad them up under the bed and desk..

Add to the airplane disaster scene , a 20 gallon tub full (ok, half full, the other half was all over the floor) of legos, dinosaur body parts, and the rods and balls of a magnetix set, crayons, countless cracker wrappers, markers, crayons, and a homemade book, lefthanded, with the cover reading “The Sword: A Book With No Pictures”. On the cover was a drawing of a sword, and inside was…nothing. No pictures. No words either but at least he’s honest.

I got his toys all sorted, airplanes and cars in this box. Windups and rubber animals in that one, army guys and weapons in another. His bed is made with a clean blanket and pillows, his clock is set and his collection of smallish animals and academic trophies dusted and shelved.

I had to stop midway through, it just got to be too much and made me very tired. So, I laid down on my bed, put Bob Holroyd on the iPod and kinda drifted off for a few, tried to anyway. Lily kept jumping up and licking my elbow. She has this sort of Banzai lick mode, where she staps at you with her tongue, which is too soft to do anything but lick, but you know you’d be poked full of holes if it weren’t for that. It’s unbelievably annoying, but the middle of the bed is uncomfortable for laying on, so I just yelled at her until she hid under the bed.

I’m not 100% done with the room. I lack a little dusting and some putting away of stuff, but if I hang it up and decide to be done, #4 will be so dismayed by the lack of clutter that he won’t notice the dust on the windowsill.

Now I’m kinda tired, needing some lunch but not knowing what.