Charis's Room

This is BEFORE clean-up...sort of. Actually, believe it or not, we had been working on picking stuff up for about an hour when I thought to take a picture! We worked for the better part of a day. I would send Charis on little "errands" (such as taking books back to the school shelves or play room toys back to their drawers) so that I could dump stuff when she wasn't looking. You wouldn't believe how much TRASH this kid had in her room! She is such a pack-rat! We completely filled our outside garbage container with sacksful of her stuff. The sad thing is, she has so much left that she'll never even miss what we threw out! She did know about some of the things we tossed...I'm not completely a mean mom!


Anyway, here is a good "after" picture, and it was actually taken about a week or so after our clean-up efforts, so you can see that she has done a good job of keeping it clean. We made sure there was a place for everything so that everything can go back in its place when she's finished playing. We've always made the kids clean up before meals and before bedtime, but somehow her room just got completely out of control while Ted was gone. I took two different occasions to help her clean, but we weren't able to do it so thoroughly, and it ended up right back where it started from and actually even worse--you literally could NOT see the carpet except for a path where she had shoved stuff out of the way so I could come tuck her in bed at night without falling over something!! Hopefully we can keep her on track to keep it nice and clean. One motivator is that before too long, she'll be sharing the room with Kenna, and we've told her that it MUST stay clean in order for Kenna to be in there. Since Charis is dying to have her little sister in her room, she's done well proving to us that she can indeed keep it clean!