Eclectic Parent

A few weeks ago we were at a housewarming party for a friend (Hi Amy!). I was complaining that our house is always a disaster area and she said it’s what we chose. At first I disagreed. But she explained that we did choose to live the way we do with kids and chaos and cats and dogs living together. And she’s right. Not that there aren’t homeschoolers that are ridiculously, completely and utterly organized, there are. We just aren’t those people. We don’t sit down at 8:30 MWF to do math; the kids open their piggy banks and start counting to figure out if they have enough money to get what they want. Our family is project based. The kids study physics by playing with magnets and seeing how much water a plastic bottle can hold before sinking. We get a wii and decide to rearrange the rooms and then decide, as long as we’re moving furniture, we should paint. We found a gecko in the house and decided to keep it. We ended up at a pet store to get it food. A few days later we passed a reptile specialty store and went in and discovered it’s probably a Mediterranean gecko and we bought tiny little crickets to feed it. So we’re the kind of family that has a gecko and tiny crickets and orders caterpillars for a butterfly house.

It made me think of a few years ago we were visiting friends and family on the east coast. We were at a friends house that we hadn’t seen since D was a toddler. We were sitting down for dinner and our kids went to grab drinks from the fridge. They were told only the mommy got to go into the refrigerator in that house.  It’s just a very different way to live. We have cups and plates low enough for them. Snack drawers they can get into. A lot of the mess of the house is things like spilled apple juice that doesn’t always get wiped up or the peanutbutter and honey smeared on the counter from making a sandwich. There’d be a lot less mess if they weren’t allowed - actually encouraged - to pour their own drinks and make their sandwiches, to fill bottles with water to see if they float, to make art and cover the walls.

It wouldn’t work for everyone. It doesn’t always work for us (well, for me - I’m the closest to wanting to be neat this family has) but it is how we  seem to operate. At there are good things to be said for thinking outside the box and learning to do things for yourself, for learning through exploring  Thursday B somehow locked the door to her bedroom and then shut it. She was locked out. I couldn’t get it open with the small piece of wire daddy uses and said we’d wait for him. But D said we could take the doorknob off. So he got out his toolkit and proceeded to figure it out. He removed the knob, opened the door and reattached it. And we was proud of himself. As he should be. I would have left the door locked and wait but he thought of something, tried it and fixed it.

So yeah, you’re right Amy. We do ask for the chaos and live with the resulting mess. And while I wish there was a bit less mess, I do love the results.