What to give up for Lent?

 

For Lent this year I am considering giving up cleaning- up after my kids?   Wow, what a concept.  They pick up their own rooms, clean their own dishes, wash their own clothes and sweep the house after each meal. Love it…. This is what my family room is supposed to look like:

But it only looks like this for brief moments of each day when my beloved Tiara is asleep.  When she is awake it looks like this:

Her favorite activity is “cutting”.  It first started a few years back when she began flipping through magazines.  Tearing out the pages seemed to really excite her but then she discovered she could cut up all the pages into tiny little pieces.  Wow, that was a big thrill, for me too.  Because she does not like many activities and it hard to keep her busy, we tend to go with whatever she likes. It also allows us something to threaten her with: “If you don’t get up off the floor right now( she is sprawled out in the center of Target), no more magazines.”   It actually works sometimes.  This new hobby escalated into an obsession quickly.  We were always running out of magazines, so she turned to books, photo albums, bills, anything she could get her hands on.  Family and friends started showing up in droves with bags of magazines for my stockpile.  In one desperate attempt, my uncle actually went around and collected the free magazines outside local stores.  The newsprint was a big nightmare, plus I forgot to mention she is very particular about what she cuts up.  One of Tabitha’s friends brought over a stack of old “Victoria” magazines and Tiara refused to cut them.  My magazine stock pile grew to epic proportions and then one day, SHE STOPPED.   This is the story of Tiara’s life.  You think you have her figured out and then she changes it up without any warning.  We were all actually thrilled when she suddenly stopped until we found out the replacement obsession:  COLORING.  We made the mistake of allowing washable makers at first but they aren’t actually washable when you take off the cap and sit on them while on the couch.  Nor when you take off the cap with your mouth a 100 times a day.  Tiara was always covered in ink, until we told everyone  “ONLY CRAYONS”.  The coloring has been going on for over a year now, but because she no longer attends school and is home with me all day, she has more time.  So she has picked up her old cutting habit and added lining up playing cards around the furniture.  The cards aren’t so bad as long as you don’t need a full deck of cards.  Don’t tell her but we keep 2 decks hidden in Lou’s closet on the top shelf, just in case we need a game of gin rummy.

Clearly I have gone off on a tangent, but I have come to the conclusion I am probably  going to give up something else, than  not cleaning-up after my kids.  If I stopped cleaning up after Tiara our house would end up on a new reality show “kids living in squalor” .

I guess I will give up “swearing” for Lent.  Over the years I have developed a mouth like a truck driver.  You can probably imagine why…..  Here’s to a clean Wednesday…..