Clean up

My children and I have different definitions of “clean.”
My definition is a fairly standard one. It’s, well, it’s clean. I actually don’t feel a need to define it. It’s like if someone says, “Hey, throw me the ball.” You know what a ball is. You shouldn’t have to say, “Hey, throw me the ball, and by ‘ball’ I mean that round thing on the ground. No, not that -- that’s a mushroom. The other thing. White. With stitches. There you go.”
My kids are 5 and 8, and I think they have pretty good vocabularies, certainly ones that should house “clean.” But a recent study of their room cleaning habits leads me to think this is one word that somehow got skipped.
Let’s start with Allie. I am fairly certain that if she is ever taken prisoner in combat, the way to get her to spill national secrets will be by putting her in a room and asking her to make a bed, complete with Princess comforter. Apparently, the 10-second act of pulling a sheet and a bed spread onto the mattress is only slightly less painful than a shark attack. At one point, she tried to use the old argument of “But I’m just going to sleep in it again tonight.” Quick solution: Pull out a dirty plate when you’re getting ready to make her dinner.
HER: Daddy, what are you doing?
ME: Using the plate we used last night. I figured no point in cleaning it, since we’ll just be using it again.
HER: Ewww.
ME: Victory is mine.
(Quick word of caution: Allie does not even like her food touching, so this was a suitable bluff tactic. Be careful if your son is like Parker, and would merely shrug and see what from last night’s meal he could scrape off for flavor.)
Clothes are a tricky one for Allie, too. She is perfectly content with a laundry basket in her room, rather than moving the clothes to the dresser or closet. She will be a perfect hotel traveler one day. Now, I know you may ask why I don’t command and demand that she put that laundry up NOW! Well, mainly because I don’t live in her room, and as long as it doesn’t get to the point where raccoons are taking up residence in there, it doesn’t occupy a huge portion of the “things that actually affect my world” portion of my brain.
Parker, too, has an aversion to cleaning, but his is less from a pain threshold stance and more from the fact that he is the most elaborate player I have ever seen. Case in point: The other day, I walked past his room and noticed it was prime raccoon roosting territory. Things were EVERYWHERE. Jack Sparrows and plastic lions and race cars covered every inch of his room. I found Parker in the depths of his room, and told him that he needed to clean it up
PARKER: But I’m still playing with stuff.
ME: Well, pick up the stuff you’re NOT playing with. You can’t even walk through your room.
PARKER. OK.
Fast forward about 11 seconds, and he’s proclaiming his doneness.
ME: I thought I said to clean up what you’re not playing with.
PARKER: I did. It was just a shirt. Everything else I’m playing with.
Clearly, I was not going to accept that, in a room that looked like an exploded Toys R Us, only a shirt needed picking up. And then Parker showed me his “zoo,” which is approximately the same size as most metropolitan zoos. He had a quite full parking lot. He had stuffed rabbits greeting visitors at the door. He had Woody and Buzz Lightyear training zebras. The works. Indeed, he was still playing with them. All 8 billion of them. That night, I did have to convince him that we had to at least put a walking path through the zoo, lest Daddy end up stepping on Superman in the middle of the night and screaming out an un-Daddy-like word.
Eventually, when the kids were not home, I ended up putting up Allie’s clothes and disassembling Parker’s zoo. Sure, you can chide me for not making a 5-year-old and an 8-year-old do their chores. I will make sure I line up some extra wood chopping for them this winter so they don’t grow up soft. In the meantime, toss me that...round thing over there.