Tidying up the Nursery: Why Does a Monkey Only Play in a Clean Room?

The boys have been driving me nuts for days!! Constantly fighting with each other. Constantly needing things that they are capable of getting themselves. Constantly asking ridiculous requests for things that they know they can’t do or have. Yelling at each other.

I can’t use tired as an excuse - at least not for them. They’ve been going to bed earlier than they have in months, and yet still waking up at their same time. So why? Why? Why? Why don’t they go and play with the bazillion toys they have?

I know I could handle all of this better if I could just get some sleep, but, despite their earlier sleep-time, neither Ebby nor Bobo sleep well even though they not being bitty babies. As a matter of fact, none of my kids slept well until they were about 6 or 7.  Bobo isn’t bad. Once or twice a week he wakes up from a bad dream and wants to crawl into our bed. But Ebby never sleeps well, and on the rare occasion that he does, it has to be in our bed with his feet in my face. My constant complaining of lack of sleep annoys even myself.

Yes, we’ve tried things to help. Herbal remedies. Nighttime routines. Being firm.  Food limitations. Yadda, yadda, yadda. But nothing works when a 4 year old starts screaming at 1 in the morning for any reason from his legs hurt to bad dreams to “I need a bit of a snuggle.”

The lack of sleep thing, I am not going to solve. With time, one hopes, all the monkeys will sleep the night through.

The not playing well during the day thing, I know what to do, but I just dread doing it.  I know that if I spend a good afternoon organizing their toys into orderly, themed containers, they will spend a good week playing well. I just don’t want to do it because I also know that at the end of the week the toys will be utter chaos and my two littlest monkeys will be at each other throats once again.

Why is it that there’s nothing like a clean and organized room that appeals to a child to spend hours or days messing it up?  Why can’t they look at a messy room and think what fun it would be to organize and sort the chaos?

Oh well. Enough time spent sitting on my bum drinking coffee. I need to go and enlist the boys into helping clean up the toys.