Tripping Hazard

I mentioned in an earlier post that our house, and our Christmas-tree-hosting living room in particular, were littered with a tidal pool of mostly plastic flotsam and jetsam following Santa's visit. There were multi-ethnic Little People clad in bike helmets or suits of armor lying amid much larger stuffed animals as though they'd been attacked. Two pairs of beaters from the Little Tykes Cooking and Baking Set lay in wait beside chairs or beneath other toys the better to injure an unsuspecting, unshod pedestrian. Storage tubs, their lids removed, stood hopefully awaiting the placement of appropriate contents inside them.

In short, the place was a disaster.

It took my inviting my neighbor over for a glass of eggnog Saturday afternoon to motivate me to corrective action. But once I got going, I was unstoppable. Unstoppable, and a dictator of whom my children were not fond.

Their initial protests against the clean-up instructions I was giving them centered on their belief that this was going to "take forever." I suppose when you've only been around for two or four years, 10 or 15 minutes seems far more significant than it does to someone of my ripe old age. Even so, I was unswayed.

More willing to think his way out of this hardship than to buckle down and do the picking up demanded, my son took a more philosophical tack.

"Why do we have to pick this stuff up, anyway?" he asked.

"We have to pick it up," I said, "because the floor is so covered with toys that you can't even take a step without--"

The target of my tirade had begun to back away from me as my voice rose, and in so doing, tumbled backward over a bin of "tea party" cups and saucers (plastic, of course).

Practical lessons are so much more powerful than theoretical ones.