I hope you agree that I am a creative and intelligent woman. (Everyone, now, nod your heads.) You will certainly agree, then, that I can quite easily turn anything involving my son into an excuse not to clean!
When my son was an infant, of course, attachment parenting and nursing took priority and I slept when he slept, which was much of the time. I was too busy exploring the miracle that was this baby to bother with any mundane chores. When he was a toddler, he was too busy exploring the miracle that was motion to let me do anything besides actively be with him and keep him safe. Now that he’s four and a half, well, it’s a whole new excuse.
The problem is that JediBoy likes things organized. He’s not generally willing to put a lot of effort into organizing them himself, or anything as helpful as that, but as soon as he notices that things have been decluttered and reorganized to the point of being freshly accessible and interesting… well, naturally that’s the moment he needs to explore…. the very things I just found a spot for on the shelf.
Today, for example, I was trying to reorganize The Art Studio, which is actually just a tall bookshelf in our kitchen. I’m not sure where I heard the idea of calling it The Art Studio, but I like the respect it implies. We don’t have a junk shelf or an art cupboard but a whole little corner of the world that is his art studio. At different times, we’ve had different sized shelves there; when he was littler we kept a small table there as well. Now he uses his art supplies right at the kitchen table.
Every three months or so, I try to take the time and really organize the art studio. We accumulate, as I suppose most homeschooling families do, an unusual amount of paper towel tubes, berry baskets, styrofoam trays, cardboard boxes, bubble wrap, yogurt cups and other wonderful things for the Making of Art. Eventually the wonderful things take over and the supplies are either buried or left out on the kitchen table or floor. The whole space becomes basically unusable and not at all inviting. So I cull through, saving a box of wonderful things in the basement, refilling paint pots and sorting plain paper from colored, markers from crayons, Perler beads from buttons.
But the reason it takes me ALL DAY to do this job is that no matter how I try to distract him, JediBoy senses the moment I finish the first shelf, and he comes into the room, eager to explore. So for the rest of the job, I have to balance my cleaning, organizing and culling (“Don’t throw THAT away! I might need that.”) with various projects of his choosing.
Today he used a date stamp (from the 80’s - it doesn’t have any year after 1999 on it) first to “play Chuck E. Cheese” and stamp my hand, repeatedly. Then he used the same stamp to be a postal worker and stamp some mail, which of course involved unpiling my fresh pile of small papers, pulling out a sheet of letter stickers to add his name, using the resorted crayons to add drawings, and so on. Then he spent a long time sorting and playing with the pine cones, buttons and pipe cleaners in some story of his own making. And of course, as soon as I’d washed and refilled the paint pots (the smartest thing I ever bought, from Lakeshore), he needed to do some painting - first experimenting with mixing red and violet, then painting lightsaber duels, then a painting of “dragon and donkey” (from Shrek).
I’m nearly done, and he’s just decided to follow me into the office and watch a video, so if I give him a little time to get into the plot, maybe I can sneak back into the art studio and finish, uninterrupted!
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