My daughter, hereafter referred to as Thing 1, lives in a pit of her own making.  Amazingly I found a photo of her bedroom online!

We’ve got a small house, it’s a small room, and I’m pretty sure there was a floor when we moved in.  Just not sure I’ve had sight of it in a number of months.

The same is true of the boys’ room.  Only with slightly more Lego.

Periodically we’ll have a go at being nice, helping them tidy up, then watching in despair as it takes mere moments to return it to it’s previous state.  Then we try getting cross with them.

And socks! What is it with socks!  It seems that my kids come home from school, dump bags and coats, remove shoes (and place them in a sort of UN-style buffer zone that’s almost but not quite in the shoe box) and then spend the next few minutes discarding their socks in unusual places around the house.  Very strange indeed.

I have no memory of being this bad at all.  Sure, I occasionally had to put a book back on the shelf, or put a little Lego away, but my room was never* a bombsite.

Now you’d think, after all this time, that children would’ve learned to listen, to equate the “Mum and Dad are shouty and cross” with “My room looks like there has been an explosion in the toybox / the dog is eating my socks again / I left all my clothes in the bathroom” and come to the conclusion that if they don’t , do these things, Mum and Dad won’t be cross.

And maybe, just maybe, if I wish hard enough, I’ll win the lottery.

*never as viewed through rose-tinted hindsight, I suspect.