Their Clean is not my clean

When I was a kid, my parents always told me to clean up. Looking back, I'm pretty sure their version was definetely not mine. When I heard the words "clean your room", I felt that meant "shove everything underneath the bed." Apparently, this was passed down to my own children.

The other day, I realized I had no silverware. SOOO, I went looking. I found a spoon in my room, a cup in my daughters, trash but no dishes in my younger son's room, and THEN...THEN I hit the jackpot. My eldest boy's room. I was happy when I spotted five forks on top of his tv. I became a little less happy as I found four bowls, eight cups, and two knives on top of his dresser in the closet. And then there was the motherload. Plates, cups, spoons, etc... (and too many to count) underneath his bed. As I grabbed a laundry basket to load up all of the missing dishes, I noticed a huge pile of laundry the size of a small mountain. Now dirty clothes is one thing, but as I started sorting them, I noticed that many of the clothes were actually STILL FOLDED and were mixed in with wet towels and dirty socks. After shoving the clothes to the middle of the room where they could not possibly be missed, I went to unplug a charger dangling from behind his couch. And there it was. The biggest pile of trash ever put on the face of the earth. Old homework, food wrappings, and empty toothpaste tubes; just to name a few. Do you know what I did? I shut the door. Yep. That's what I did. I have many jobs as a mother, but cleaning the city dump is not one of them.

The moral of the story is this: If you tell your children to clean their room, and they come out in 5 minutes, it's not clean. Now I'm sure they're sweaty, but that's only because it takes a lot of effort to shove all that garbage under the bed, in the closet, and behind furniture.