Remind me to clean their room on the first day...

When my boys are away at camp, one of my rituals is to clean out their room. I do it every summer. Every year,  I procrastinate and wait until camp is almost over to do it and bitch the entire  time.  Every summer I am amazed at the amount of crap that they have accumulated in just one calendar year.

My boys share a room. I have a housekeeper who "cleans" it every week and they are in charge of keeping it "neat".  I try not to go in there during the school year too much as I get overwhelmed. Instead of working with the crack cleaning team that I have assembled and keeping it tidy, I just turn around and go into another room.

This year, before they left for camp, the team spent a day in the room. I made each child try on every single clothing item which led to me realizing that they had no clothing that actually fit them. They said that they cleaned up the rest of the room. ( I did not verify this).   I thought that this would lead to my summer chore of the one-a-year major clean out being a breeze.  It was not.

Yesterday I started out under their beds. They each have a loft bed and going in underneath was like a treasure hunt. Here are some of the pearls that I found :

1. Unopened letters that I sent to camp last year

 (This is not one of them. I don't have a child named Merdith)

2. A Christmas tin of life-savers (like an 8 pack), also unopened.

3. 3 unopened packages of legos and other little toys that they accumulated but never opened

4. A Target gift card (unused and obviously misplaced)

5. A visa gift card

6. 12 pairs of headphones which was especially annoying given that they are always telling me that they have no headphones and I am always buying them more.

7. Four string backpacks which was also annoying because I had to buy string backpacks for camp because they sad that they could not find any in their closets

8. Eight usb flashdrives. (see number 6)

9. A cache of discarded electronic devices (cameras, iphones, ipods, nintendo ds')

10. Many socks

It was like an episode of mini- hoarders in my own home. Or we could host a new show called, "Why the Japolina  spends all of her money on headphones and usb flash drives instead of designer shoes". We could be the new Honey Boo Boo Family where every one makes fun of how stupid we are.

So once again, I spent one of my precious summer camp days entrenched in their room, trying not to cry when packing up their babyish books  to take to goodwill. Once again I am cursing myself for not doing this the first day that they were gone. Remind me to do this task right when they leave next year, and get it out of the way.