Clean room

Here are the top 5 reasons in our house to keep a clean bedroom:

5. Mom and/or Dad will not feel the urge to yell at you when they walk past the room.
4. You will have clean clothes to wear because your dirty clothes will be in the hamper so that Mom can wash them.
3. You can walk into the room without breaking something or killing yourself.
2. You can actually find things.

and the #1 reason to keep a clean bedroom:

If you happen to get sick in the middle of the night and accidentally throw-up over the side of your bed, you are less likely to get it all over your clothes, books and/or toys that are all over the room!


Now for the story behind the list:
On Monday I went down to M&M and Blondie's bedroom and as usual it was a complete mess. M&M and Blondie are probably my worst two when it comes to keeping a clean room - so having them share a room just compounds the problem. For some inexplicable reason that day I felt like I should clean it up for them. I enlisted the help of Blondie and Kitty (M&M was still at school) and proceeded to clean up all of the books, clothes, toys, papers, etc from off of the floor, table, dressers, etc. I helped Blondie make her bed and we threw away a lot of trash in the form of wrappers & papers. I think a part of me wanted to help out M&M a little because she had been having some difficulties in school the past week and so I thought that maybe she would be able to handle things a little bit better if she didn't have a messy room on top of everything else. After M&M's band and soccer practices I had her go down and put away all of the clothes that I had put on her bed (since I didn't know which ones were clean and which ones were dirty) and to make her bed.

Then at about 3 in the morning I open my eyes to see M&M in my room trying to wake me up to tell me that she threw up! I asked her where and she said, "I don't know. On the floor I think." DH is fighting consciousness beside me and I heard him mumble something. After asking him to repeat himself a couple of times I finally heard him say to M&M, "Go down and help clean it up then."

I thought that that was a weird thing to say to one of your kids who is feeling sick and has thrown up. He claimed the next day that he doesn't remember saying that, or anything for that matter... Hmmmmm :)

Anyways, I went downstairs and got M&M a bowl because she said her stomach was still hurting her and was able to convince her to take some children's Pepto-Bismol - which is a huge thing because M&M hates any kind of medicine. Then I went down to the bedroom to survey the damage. There was some mess on the floor and particularly on one of Blondie's pillows that was on the floor and then a little bit on both kids' comforters and M&M's sheets. There was also one stuffed animal that ended up being in harm's way but the material it was made out of cleaned up really easily. All in all I just had to do one load of wash and then some spot cleaning here and there.

It wasn't until the next day that I realized how blessed we were that I had felt the need to clean up the bedroom the day before. The state that the room had been in for a week or two surely would have resulted in a good number of clothes that would have needed washing as well as books and toys that would have been ruined (including some library books).

And to top it all off M&M felt fine the next morning and went to school.
And so far no one else has gotten sick. :)
Keeping our fingers crossed!!