Rubble shoveling

Every once and a while (like when we can't get her door all the way open anymore) I try to sort toys in Emma's room. It's brutal. It's best done when she's not around...which is NEVER. Yesterday while her father was mowing the yard (which she insisted on watching), I set her up on the front porch with a variety of Dora toys. Dora talking minivan, Diego talking jeep and trailer and Fairy tale Dora horse and carriage. It was a Nick Junior Marketing Executive's dream come true. She was happy as a clam and I issued one of the standard MOTHER COMMANDS "and STAY on this PORCH!" She nodded happily and stuffed Diego upside down into the driver's seat of the van.

So I went back in the house to her room (don't worry, I had the window open where I could see the front porch to watch for child abductors and aliens from other planets) and I started THE SORT. I'm telling you...the worst was the ankle deep layer of Happy Meal toys. I think she has every HM toy ever produced and two or three of some of them. Which doesn't say much for the nutritional habits of our child, but then again that's why my mother calls her Saturated-Fat Girl. Anyway...I was about half way through sorting the castle people from the farm and the zoo people, and had all the naked babies in a pile on the bed when I heard a little voice in the doorway. "MOMMY. WHAT are you DOING??" Busted. I scooted the pile of "weird" HM toys under the bed that were on their way to the garbage and said "Em! I'm cleaning up your room!" She looked at the piles and the already organized bins in her closet and started to point out which toys could NOT be in the bins with certain other toys. Pretty soon she had it all dumped out again. Naked babies mixed with teddy bears, pink feather boa wrapped around her neck, HM toys, toy horses, farm people and castle people were all intermingled into one big conglomerate pile. I mentioned that Dora and Diego were getting awfully lonely on the front porch. She picked up a naked baby wearing only blue Cabbage Patch shoes and said "I'd rather help you Mommy". Finally Joe came in and distracted her long enough with something so that I could finish picking up the Lite Brite pegs from under her bed, in her closet, in her shoes, under her TV etc and get them into one Little Mermaid Tea Set cup. We had everything finally off the floor, in it's proper bins, castle people living in the castle, farm people communing with the cows. Bed was made, pillows fluffed, Care Bears all arranged at the head of the bed. You could walk! You could close doors! You could SEE THE FLOOR! She was playing happily on the floor with several horses from the castle in a room that had been mayhem only a couple of hours before. We'd done it. The beast had been tamed! We turned to leave the idyllic scene of our daughter playing on the floor in the room and as we left, Joe accidentally tipped over one of the horses she was playing with. "DAD! You're MESSIN stuff UP!" Well now we know where she gets it.