I have bad timing. I also have a bad sense of direction, but that’s a different problem altogether. Only someone with bad timing would have four of their children’s birthdays all occur within the same 30 days (Amy’s birthday is this weekend). Last night I missed a phone call because I was busy torturing Sarah. Bad phone timing, not bad Sarah torture timing. It’s always a good time to torture your children. Last week I spent the week cleaning Tommy’s room. No, cleaning is the wrong word. There was no windex or 409 involved. I emptied every shelf, drawer, nook and cranny in the room and sorted it all into the three magic piles (toss, hand-down, keep). I learned something I either didn’t know or had forgotten about Tommy’s quirks. I’ll save that thought for later. Then I arranged everything so that similar items were stored together. ALL the D&D junk is now on the same shelf instead of in 8 different places in the room. Once he accepted that he couldn’t dig through my trash and Goodwill bags, Tommy stayed out of the room while I did this. When it was finished, he was happy. All the useless scraps of paper and such that he couldn’t get rid of were now gone and long hidden treasures were revealed.

This week I am doing the same thing in the girls’ room. Bad timing. I should have done their room when Sarah was away at camp last week. “Where is my *bottle cap collection? I can’t find all my *fortune cookie fortunes.” Tears, complaints and general drama because I am cleaning out the trash and organizing things so that they can be found. Amy gets it. “Mom! Look at all the stuff that was lost!” I keep having to remind myself that Sarah is the mature child. She is my straight A, high school AP child who weeps because I threw away a pile of receipts from Hot Topic. I have learned my lesson, though. I won’t be attacking Noah’s room until he leaves for camp the week after next.

* For the record, I did not throw either away. I just created a central location for all the caps and a container for the ten thousand small rectangles of paper.