We really don’t buy a lot of toys for our daughter. We’re quite restrained, especially in comparison to our cohort of older parents with enough disposable income to buy stuff from those fancy catalogs with wooden toys. You know, the wooden toys kids won’t actually play with.
Our restraint has nothing on my mother’s talent for excess, though. My mother waited a long time for a grandchild and she is determined to make up for the lost years. Plus there are two older cousins who send us what they’re done with. Today we sorted through everything in my daughter’s room (we didn’t get to the closet) and we tossed an alarming amount of stuff into the garbage, which really bothers me, but there wasn’t any choice. Our dish drainer is full of plastic dishes and pots and pans and plastic food, all of which will go with the play kitchen to its next home – the volume is staggering. There’s a huge box of stuff for donation, and my daughter is happily going to sleep in a much tidier and pleasantly re-arranged room.
“It’s my princess room!” she said. “Really? What makes it a princess room?” asked her generally anti-princess mommy. “It’s all neat and clean. Princesses keep their rooms neat and clean. That’s how you know they’re princesses”. We’ve already recognized that our daughter is a naturally neat person who landed in the home of two not-so-naturally neat parents; when she was four, she said “Mommy, why don’t you make your bed every day like I do? It’s so much better”.
Things I didn’t know when I became a parent: that I would end up owning barrels full of primary-colored plastic without ever buying any of it, and that it’s possible for a child to be neater than the adults.
Tomorrow we tackle the toy room, this time without her assistance. Some tasks are too nasty for children.