Cleaning Anna's Room
I am taking a break from the massive undertaking of cleaning out Anna's bedroom. It is truly frightening just how much crap one 5 year old can accumulate. This is day two of the clean out and although the room is not clean, 13 Hungarian midgets were discovered lurking in the bottom of the toy box and were set free as were two dozen alligators and a flock of geese. All had been cohabiting peacefully in the depths of the closet.
Seriously, this has been the hardest job ever! I have got so many different categories going for the sorting that I can't even keep track of them all! There are baby toys to keep, baby toys to toss, books to keep, books to store, books to go to GoodWill, Barbies with heads, Barbies with no heads, empty liquor bottles (not really, just testing to see if you are paying attention!!), and thousands of other categories. But I am being completely ruthless, throwing out McDonald's toys left and right.
The problem with this job is the sheer number of parts each toy has. Back in the old days, you were happy to get just a doll. The accessories were separate and were purchased bit by bit and treasured accordingly. Now, thanks to new trade agreements with China, each doll comes with an entire trousseau of tiny plastic pieces, that cannot, under any circumstances, be thrown away without express written consent from the owner. Every Barbie and every Pony comes with a brush. That translates into roughly 437 plastic brushes in Anna's closet. I am throwing away 436 of them.
I am really good about not buying things for my kids every time we go to the store. They rarely get a toy and if they do, it's not much. But it almost never happens. So how then, did we get the contents of Toy's R Us in our house??? Birthday gifts account for some of it, I suppose, and maybe Christmas, but there has got to be a darker force at work here. Obviously, late at night, when we are all asleep, some evil creature steals out from beneath the Barbie shoes and waves a wand and causes the clutter to multiply. That's got to be it.
And speaking of evil, I am getting really freaked out up there alone in her room. She has these twin talking baby dolls Roseanna's mom gave her and they are the scariest things I have ever seen. I didn't realize they were switched on when I threw them out of the closet. Suddenly, behind me I hear "I like peanut butter." You want to talk about things that cause incontinence, scary little voices like that top the list!! I turn around and there it is beaming angelically at me. The part of me that has read waaaaaaayyyyyyyyy too many Stephen King novels imagined it reaching out with it's little plastic hands and gouging my eyeballs out while it prattled on about peanut butter. I hate my imagination.
Anyway, I have sorted 3,000 Legos, which are not to be confused with the waffles Anna eats for breakfast in the morning. I have stepped on and flipped the basket of toy horses three times. I have gouged my knee on a small metal car. I am ready to start drinking heavily while I incinerate the whole room. I hate cleaning house. On the plus side, given Anna's demonic tendencies, I have not discovered any traces of animal sacrifices or any suspicious openings that look like portals to hell, so that is a good thing!
Sigh, I guess I'll go back up there and face down the talking twins of terror. Maybe that can be my next novel, if I ever finish up with the Bodice Ripper.
