What’s the first thing you
do when your child goes to sleep?
Pour a glass of wine? Slump
in front of the TV? Breathe an exaggerated sigh of relief (because even though
you love them, they’re exhausting)?
In my house it isn’t any of
those things. It’s tidying up the accumulated mess they’ve made since the last
time they were asleep. All the time Cam spends awake he is deconstructing the
world around him, systematically unpacking EVERY SINGLE TOY in his possession
and scattering it about the place.
Here’s a time lapse of me
sorting them back into their proper place once he’s settled for a snooze:
I did it in time lapse
because filming it properly would have been a four minute long waste of your
time. This way I’ve only wasted twenty seconds. You’re welcome.
What I’m starting to wonder
(after just a year or so of routinely stooping to the ground for four minutes
at a time, several times a day) is whether this whole tidying lark is utterly,
utterly pointless. Obviously, objectively, it is. There is no sense in putting
away a collection of things which will IMMEDIATELY be taken out and strewn
across our living room again once Cam wakes up. But is there anything in it for
him? Mrs L reckons it’s a good thing to do, because it means he gets to
rediscover all his toys every time. But Mrs L likes to keep a tidy house, so
that may just be a convenient excuse.
I, on the other hand, have
never been a big fan of tidying. Or cleaning. It is all so quickly undone. Does
dusting actually achieve anything? Aren’t you just moving the dust from one
place to another, so that the new place needs dusting? Or, if you capture the
dust in some cunning receptacle, you’re just leaving space for NEW DUST to
accumulate. I don’t really know what dust is. I suspect I don’t want to know.
Bits of skin that have parted company with the body? The broken down remnants
of pizzas long since eaten? The cough inducing ephemera of daily life I
suppose. Dust. Pah.
I’ll carry on with the
pointless tidy, of course, until the glorious day I can make Cam do it himself.
In the meantime, I might just make sure I have a glass of wine first.
Does everyone do The Tidy?
Or have I fallen into some weird tidy trap? What’s the first thing you do when
your little people head to bed?
