Countermeasures

Watching my children play, it's clear that they are avid subscribers to the Second Law of Thermodynamics, namely, that spontaneous processes contribute to disorder in the Universe at large, and specifically this house. Give my children ten minutes and some toys, and they can scatter them in a perfect random distribution throughout the house. Furthermore, they can turn on toys, faucets, unroll toilet paper, and shred paper or books with uncanny speed and alacrity that is never employed to eat disfavored foods.

Thus, I have begun employing the "just five minutes a day" countermeasure to this clutter and chaos induction. For just five minutes each day, I am attempting to clean up and keep up with the spread of chaos by reintroducing order.

What this is turning into, in practice, is at least five minutes spent cleaning, but often more. I've just spent 30 minutes tidying and cleaning, because one thing inevitably led to another and while I started tidying 2 tables, I progressed to tidying the PlayDoh table, then toys in general, then "Oh my the carpet doesn't react well to Play Doh and it really needs a good vacuuming anyway" and before I knew it I had vacuumed half my house and reorganized the living room toys into an appropriate basket! Behold, the power of the "five minutes a day" head strategy for at least starting to make order from chaos.

Regarding PlayDoh, have you ever noticed how it is impossible to thoroughly clean out PlayDoh from the toys they make to shape it and extrude cool things? It's like the engineers purposefully obscured the design and added tiny little crevices to grab and hold onto the PlayDoh until it falls out, rock solid and unable to be used. I'm quite certain they did this on purpose, because that means eventually you will use up all of your PlayDoh and have to buy more. I wish I could talk to those toy engineers and reassure them on that score. You see, preschoolers leave PlayDoh out until it gets hard and crusty, and then a parent is forced to toss it because it can no longer be shaped. So really, it was unnecessary to badly design the extruder toys, because the child him or her self will render the PlayDoh obsolete far before those crevices can eat it all up. Further, a parent is also forced to wonder if the Dyson can really handle all those large-ish clumps of PlayDoh on the carpet and be forced to pick it up by hand, aggravating any sore back issues that may plague a parent.

Yep, five minutes a day to clean...and at least five to pick up PlayDoh. At least I finished my Bible study homework early today!