Fighting words

My children have all been great dumpers and tossers of things. The basic recipe goes something like: upend one tin of blocks, add a generous amount of Legos, and a smattering of cars. Using your hands, mix well until ingredients are incorporated, and then repeat vigorously, until items are spread to the far corners of the house.

Sacha is by far, my most talented child in this respect, and I am waiting patiently for him to outgrow this phase.

In the meantime, because I am a control freak have a low threshold for chaos, I spend a good amount of time sorting and returning things to their rightful places. This kind of routine busing of the house is so automatic to me that I do it unthinkingly, and without complaint.

The thing I cannot abide, however, is the flinging. Sacha walks in, sees pillows and blankets neatly arranged on the upholstery, and then methodically tosses everything to the floor. He stops to assess his work, and moves on to the den to do it again.

It is how my house goes, in under sixty seconds, from this:

to this:

  


It would be one thing if this happened in the course of play – say, making a fort – but the flinging appears to be an exercise in itself. More often than not, once the flinging is done, so is Sacha. His work is so deliberate that it is hard for me not to take it personally. It's as if he is certain that my insistence on placing pillows on the furniture is wrongheaded, and if he rearranges things often enough, eventually I will come to agree. 

Or so I thought, until I walked in to the living room last weekend to find Sacha wrestling with a brown pillow, shouting, “YOU'RE GOING DOWN PILLOW, YOU'RE GOING DOWN!”

This gave me a different perspective. In hindsight, we often realize our tendency to personalize things that have nothing to do with us. I thought the flinging was about me, but now, I saw that it was the pillows, not me, that are Sacha's nemesis.

I'd like to say that this insight gave me new found tolerance for Sacha's idiosyncrisy, but that would be a baldfaced lie. It's still extremely annoying.

Domestic dispute

I recently took a big step forward in housekeeping, and freed myself from the tyranny of the dish drying rack.

Ever since we moved house almost two years ago, and were advised to clear everything from our kitchen counters for house showings, I have become slightly fascist about kitchen clutter. While our old house was on the market, it was a pain in the ass to go to the basement to retrieve the toaster, but there was something so serene about the empty expanse of kitchen counter.

When I set up my new kitchen, I did it with an eye toward keeping only what I use daily on the counters. Although it may make me seem like a shallow person, I am not afraid to admit that it gives me a thrill to see so much white (actually, almond, to be accurate) space.

The one thing I was not able to give up was the drying rack.

And yet, every time I walked into someone else's house where there was no drying rack, I was a bit awed. How did they do it? Surely the wooden spatulas cannot go in the dishwasher? To say nothing of the over sized items, the wineglasses, and the fragile, but attractive, and impressively inexpensive drinking glasses, that have been known to shatter when they jostle up against other items during the wash cycle?

Last month, I had a vision of me, sans dish rack. I mulled it over, and last week, I went for it. I put a hook on the side of the cabinet to hang a towel, which I lay on the counter for hand washed items. After washing the dishes, I dry and put them away, and hang my towel out of sight.

I cannot tell you how this small adjustment pleases me!

Last night, David revealed that he does not like this new arrangement.

He cleans up after dinner, and so while I have less clutter, he has more work, as he can no longer leave the dishes on the counter to dry overnight for me to put away in the morning.

My husband is highly accomplished domestically. He may have better maternal instincts than me, is an excellent cook, has no compunction about cleaning the bathrooms, or doing laundry. (He can't fold for shit, but I think this is a genetic flaw.)

So although I know it is unfair to lay a greater share of domestic responsibility at his feet because I am aesthetically controlling I have a highly refined aesthetic sensibility, as the one who spends more time at home, I decided that my vote counts twice, and so I'm afraid he's going to have to suck it up.

Thanks for understanding, love.