Several months ago, I have written in this blog that my son didn’t like tidying up.
This has changed. He doesn’t throw things on the floor anymore but puts them into boxes or onto the tables. I had to take one of his socks off the dining table today.
He also started to be appalled when we spill his toys on the floor in order to find one particular toy. Or he gasps and laughs afterwards.
This is the way Niklas tidied up last Saturday. He took an empty laundry basket, put it in the middle of our living room, which is also his playroom today, and piled various toys in it, so that the toy-tower was taller than him. Looking at his creation he said proudly: “Now I have tidied up!” I had to explain myself to him when I started to un-pile the tower and put the toys on racks and into boxes at the end of the day.
On the same day, I was folding up our washed and dried clothes as I recalled several occasions, on which I did this before. On some of them, I was in hurry and folded up the clean clothes and linen while standing in our master bedroom between the bed and the closet and trying to finish the task as fast as possible. I didn’t enjoy those. On other times and this time as well, I sat on my cover as one would sit on a picnic blanket and played memory while folding up the socks. I had fun. And I came up with a fun name for my new hobby. A laundry picnic.
The experiences on this day made me realize that we humans are not only complaining or seeing the things we usually enjoy sometimes as a burden, of what we often accuse ourselves in. I realized that we are definitely able to turn the activities, we might not have liked before, into a hobby.
When did you have your last laundry picnic?
Picture: Our window sill tidied up by Niklas.
