I never realized how easy it is for a child to make a clean house messy. It's not so easy for an adult, but for a two year old, it's a piece of cake. It's almost like they do it on purpose. In their little minds they're thinking "My parents just spent the last hour cleaning the house, and now everything is perfect . . . almost too perfect." Before I had kids, I was somewhat of a neat freak. My bed was always made, my clothes were always put away neatly, I rarely left dishes in the sink, the house or my room always had a candle lit. Everything had a place and was in their place. But now I've gotten to a point with AJ where I have just learned to let things be. His room is a disaster? Whatever, we'll clean it tomorrow. He has hella laundry that needs to be folded? I'll fold it on my day off. I never let things stay dirty, but I do allow him to make a mess. I mean he's two years old, I'm not going to not let him make a mess. But I can't say it's easy to sit back and watch him terrorize my house. Sometimes I want to put him in his own little bubble where he can't mess anything up. But as a dad who wants to let my son express his creativity, I condone the mess making. As you can see from this video, AJ got into a package we got in the mail that had a lot of styrofoam. And his way of expressing himself on this day was by taking the styrofoam apart piece by piece by piece by piece... I'm not sure if he thought eventually something different was going to happen. Or if he thought that having a million pieces of styrofoam was better than one. Or if he just wasn't thinking at all and was just letting his hands go to work. Whatever the reason was didn't matter. As I realized what was happening I said to myself "Screw it, just let the kid make a mess." And as much as I wanted to grab everything from him and throw it away before he could display his art, I just couldn't help but laugh at how great this moment was. His demeanor remained the same the whole time, stoic and silent. He just kept grabbing it and tearing it apart over and over. This went on for about 10 minutes before he finally took a break, checked on his baby brother, then went back at it for another five minutes. Yes, I eventually had to clean up the mess. I wasn't going to let AJ do it because it would've never gotten clean.
But that moment in time was priceless. Watching my son's brain work like I've never seen before was beautiful. He was truly in a state of pure bliss. So much so that he couldn't even display any type of emotion. As I sat behind the camera, (laughing my ass off silently as to not disturb his work in progress) all I could think about was all the times I told him not to do something because he might make a mess. And although I won't let him go crazy all the time, I will check with myself first and ask if it's worth it to stop him or let him be free.
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AuthorLiving Life happily Under The Irrelevance Archives
July 2020
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