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I've thought about doing that myself, but there's one problem: No one who lives with me who's under the age of 15 would notice anything
different until he/she ran out of underwear.
As you might have gathered, I have two children on the cusp of teen-hood, which means all the years spent exhorting them to put their
toys back up after they play with them have been negated in a flood of hormones.
Yep – my house is now missing two bedrooms with their corresponding baths. Instead, they've been turned into landfills without the land.
Take my son's bedroom, for example.
He owns somewhere in the neighborhood of 49,000 little plastic things. Not men. Not animals. Just things: Weird creatures from his
cartoon shows, errant Legos, game pieces and other sundry plastic goodies he normally stores in the carpet pile of his bedroom. We know that's where he keeps the stuff because when we walk in his room our feet make
crunching sounds and he's constantly wailing that Dad or Mom broke an important, irreplaceable little plastic thing for which only he and Ryan, his best friend, know the use.
My husband's compassionate parental response is to grab a large plastic bag of the type one generally fills with leaves and stuff about
5,000 or so of the little gizmos in it and toss it on the curb. But that only dents the problem: it's not just the junk on the carpet. The entire room is a mess, despite my attempts to convince him that if he'd only
clean as he goes along, life would be so much simpler. And that leads to conversations such as this one:
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