Hoarders- 11 year old boy edition.

 The Christmas preparations continue.....and I could ignore no longer the disaster that was Youngest's room. Christmas presents should not be given unto a child with a room that horrid. This is how even he felt about the mess:

So, the trauma of yesterday was announcing to him that is was time to put our courage to the sticking place and ATTACK!!

                                                 It was easy to be alarmed by this notion.



Youngest's room is a dark place in our home. It is, well, apocalyptic. He is completely overwhelmed when it comes to reparations of the mess, and completely lackadaisical about creating it. And, this time, it had gotten well beyond even my fortitude. So, instead of trying to clean it up, I employed my stall cleaning talents and helped him shovel the mess into black plastic garbage bags- the big kind. 10 of them. Full to the top. The plan is to unpack one bag a night, making piles for Goodwill, keeping what is relevant and trashing what is left. In all this, we did manage to pull out two kitchen garbage sized bags of trash that was quite evidently- trash. I think if CPS saw his room, he'd be repo'ed.
Frankly, by 7 pm we were both driven to drink.

From preceding paragraph, you can intimate that I am not a "cleaning mother". I don't clean up their rooms. I don't even do their laundry ( that stopped when I realized that if I had another stack of folded shirts and matched socks end up in the laundry bin, I'd be in the loony bin). They have to do their own laundry and keep their own rooms. Only, it sounds more effective than the reality.
So, braced by a libation, (well, he had a tuna boat) we persevered, scrubbing the walls (how do his feet get so high on the wall so frequently?) and the floor, and sweeping out the fireplace, he now has a not-quite-bare room, and I have a laundry room stuffed with black plastic garbage bags.
Darn- looks like I moved his mess to common space. Ugh.