It had been a while, but yesterday we gave in and did what we’d been threatening with for a while, to clean out the kids’ rooms the hard way, cleaning up their floor and taking away (most of) the toys found there. If they can’t figure out that they really need to clean up after themselves, they can just start practicing it with fewer toys, and we’ll see how that goes.
Of course we didn’t do that while they were there to witness it, although perhaps we should, next time, for added impact. No, they spent the day with M‘s mother, picked up around 7:30 AM to give us a relatively early start and getting picked up around 5-6PM (we did some shopping at the end of the afternoon, then drove over there).
Aside from cleaning up we also reorganised the rooms, one a bit more than the other. In N‘s room for instance we took apart one dresser that was close to falling apart all by its happy self and rearranged the wardrobe and other (new) dresser to give his room a slightly different layout. Hopefully a change for the better. In A‘s room I took the mirror from his dresser. He’s got a habit of watching himself in the mirror when he’s angry, upset, crying, etc, like he’s practicing his facial expression; The mirror also slows him down a lot in the morning when he’s supposed to get dressed for school. So hopefully that’ll improve a bit.
It was amusing to see if the boys would actually miss anything. They get so many toys from family around Christmas and for birthdays that it’s hard to keep up, sometimes. I think N maybe missed one or two small items, while we took a garbage bag full away out of his room, and it took A 3 hours to realise the mirror was gone! 
We had planned to put bulletin boards in each of the rooms but because we picked up the boys on our way home we didn’t get around to that and today has been too fragmented to get anything done. Perhaps it’ll be a surprise for them when they come home tomorrow after school, we’ll see.
