10 Advantages to Having a Messy Kid
1. You save on cleaning supplies.
2. Nothing is thrown out by mistake.
3. Extended carpet life since his/her bedroom is covered with laundry and has never actually been walked on.
4. Benjamin Franklin, Albert Einstein and John Lennon have been described as "messy."
5. Wrestling with overstuffed drawers and jam-packed closets builds upper-body strength.
6. "El slobbo" will develop early reasoning and debating skills trying to convince people he/she can locate anything in the pigsty.
7. Bug "bombs" encourage fresh air for the enitre family.
8. A prescription for penicillin isn't necessary. It grows under junior's bed.
9. You have a perpetual reason to update dishware; once dishes cross into the Bermuda Bedroom Triangle, they're never seen again.
10. Falling out of bed won't hurt. Trash will cushion the impact.
Comments
Yep, you described my 14-year-old son to a T. Funny, though, how two kids with the same two parents can be so different. My 17-year-old daughter, a perpetual neat freak, puts me to shame with her always-made bed and perfectly lined-up books on the shelf. Naturally, her shining example of "what a bedroom should look like, if you have any pride at all" doesn't shame her brother in the slightest, who delights in making fun of her neatness.
I've decided, however, that neatness is genetic. My children's paternal grandmother is a neat-nik. She gets beside herself if she hasn't keep her schedule of dusting the baseboards — in every room, including the behind-the-piano-and-50-ton-book-cabinet baseboards — once each season or "washing the windows" at least twice a year. My daughter, clearly takes after her father's side of the family (though the gene must have skipped a generation), since I still haven't "found time" to once wash the front-porch windows in the house we moved into six years ago (and, what's a baseboard?). My son, bless his heart, takes after me, and I apologize now to his future wife for that.