A Messy House And The Excuse!

I always wondered looking at pristine homes in the magazines of interior design, if I will ever have one. Who has houses like that? Do they have kids? Are their kids not messy at all? Or am I the only one with a kid with a messy knack.

Come any time, on any day to my house back in India and you would think whether a tornado paid a visit just to my house, exclusively. The toddler made it her first job to try and come up with new places to put her toys. (Stuff them or jam them if they don’t fit sometimes)

If you want to know where the toddler is, you would just have to follow the trail of blocks. She made sure that she can be found always. (Survival Technique?)
The walls would tell a new story each day! Thank God we have washable paint. I had managed somehow to keep her to just one wall. I know it’s supposed to be precious and I need to cherish and go ‘awww’ at my creation’s creation.

If you have ever lived in an apartment with a toddler in countries like US or UK or NZ, you might sympathise with me a bit. I dread the rules here. They mostly expect the house to be left as they gave us. But most days, all I can think is the landlord and the bill in $$s which we will surely get at the end of the tenancy.

Ha! That is funny to me. No wonder we didn’t get most apartments once they heard we had a toddler.

So I hit the net (as usual) for solutions and tips and tricks to keep the apartment sane.

I have come with the only solution which seems to be a solution for everything to do with toddlers. Involve her. I make cleaning fun. I involve her in putting dishes in the washer, dirty clothes in the washing machine and even get the clothes out of the dryer. Vacuuming is her favourite. She relates to it as ‘noo-noo’ from the Teletubbies. So she loves playing with the ‘noo-noo’ most days.

But I also have off days. I leave one or two days to be the messy days. Mostly the Fridays and Saturdays. No cleaning on these days. We still do all the activities that can create major mess. Like finger painting and baking but I bring newspapers to real good use.

And on a sunny day, the balcony becomes the activity center. Anything to save the carpets really.

Its tough to restrict a child. I feel really bad that I have to stop her from doing what comes naturally to her and reason her with sentences like the landlord will not like that and she asks who is the landlord. Now she just grumbles that the landlord is a bad boy!

An erstwhile Quality Analyst, Sirisha Achanta, is now a full-time mommy to an adorable 2-year-old girl and a part-time writer. 🙂  She loves to dance, dream and read a lot!