I'm obsessed with order and putting things back in their place. This stems from the four years I spent living in an apartment in Gramercy Park. It was a two bedroom that I shared with a photographer who I was promised would always be traveling. It turned out that his wandering days were long over.
So, by "shared" I mean I hid in my room as much as humanly possible.
My 60 square foot room.
I had all my life belongings in this teeny tiny cramped space and as a result I became the ultimate neat freak. I mean, how couldn't you when a shirt on the couch (which doubled as a bed) made the whole place look wrecked.
We now live in a fairly decent sized apartment. We have an insane amount of stuff in the kids' room. And as for our room, well, we have a king-sized bed, two end tables, a cat condo, sewing table, two full-sized desks, a printer stand, a storage bench and bookcases lining the wall facing our bed. Oh and some yarn that has spilled out from the kiddos' room into ours. (My stash knows no bounds.) And yes, we've (read: I've) outgrown our space. But compared to 60 square feet, this apartment is simply palatial.
Getting back to clutter -- I can't stand it. But I have learned to live with it. Or at least most of it. But the one thing that I must must must do nightly is put all the toys back in their place. That means putting the things that pull out of something else back into them. It means putting the take apart sandwich back together and obsessing over the piece of felt cheese that completes it. (We always lose that damned cheese for some reason.) It means counting all the blocks and making sure there are 31 Legos in the box and that the Fisher Price Little Person fisherman is back in his boat, while ensuring that his buddy the orca has found his way back from the bathroom. It means hanging the phone back up on the playpen cum babygate.
It means going to the ends of the world -- and by ends I mean Amazon -- to find a replacement cow for their talking farmhouse
Now, I've given up on some things. Like the octopus, sea horse, pufferfish and penguin that never made it back to the bath toy bag. They're now happily used as distractions during diaper change. "Have a penguin, Hunter," is heard more often than not.
At first, Mark questioned my sanity regarding my attempts to set this chaos right. But when I pointed out that the kids liked pulling stuff out of the cubes; that they liked tearing the sandwich apart; that maybe, one day, when they're older they'd wonder where the fucking cow that Maia ate went, he kinda fell quiet.
And left me alone to my madness.
Still, I still think that Aden and Hunter appreciate my efforts...
Knitting update on Friday. Stay tuned...
