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Today is August 1st, and July 27 was 5 days ago. For five days, my children have not watched any television, played on the computer, played with the Nintendo DS at all. Why you ask? Because I had reached my limit.

When their bedrooms overflow with toys on the floor, shoes, hints of pajamas tossed about, I can stand it for a while. I understand what it’s like to live a little recklessly…procrastinate till another day…get so absorbed in one item that you don’t really see the mess around you. But when I reach my limit, I have a method for dealing with it.

Here’s the deal, either clean your room up by ‘X’ time or I will come in here with a trash bag and take care of it for you. If you have already decided that cleaning your room is something you don’t want to do, I’ll go ahead and get the trash bag right now.

Usually, Suzanne opts to go for the trash bag right away, while Ethan whines and begs and cleans three toys, then gets ‘distracted’, starts to play, which means when ‘X’ time comes along, the majority of his toys are getting bagged also.

So there was a bag of toys in the garage. There were two bags of toys in my bedroom. And their room had hit disastrous proportions. Last Thursday, right after they woke up, I made the announcement.

“No television or anything electronic until this mess is picked up. I don’t care if it takes 3 hours, 3 days, or 3 weeks. I am not helping, and you don’t have to start this minute, but until all these toys are cleaned up and all the bags of toys are put away, there will be no tv!”

So I turn around and leave the room. They look at each other and begin to play. After all, I didn’t say it had to be right this instance. All day Thursday, they play. Suzanne asked to watch tv after her nap, I reminded her about the toys, she shrugged and that was that.

Friday morning, Ethan asked for the tv, I reminded him, and he cried and wailed and I held my ground. After 5 minutes, he shrugged and off he went.

All weekend long, they played together. They play really well together, so I was happy I only had to remind them of the tv/toy bargain once in a while.

But this weekend, my husband and I are going on our special ‘anniversary’ weekend. I really didn’t want their toys hanging over my head all weekend. I also didn’t want to torture the grandparents by not giving them permission to watch while Nana makes dinner or while Grandma Beckie showers. Tuesday night, I had enough of their laziness and I bagged up all their toys. But left the bags in their rooms.

Wednesday morning, I told them that the toys were going to get taken care of TODAY! In fact, for one hour, I let them watch tv so they could remember what they were missing. Then they ate breakfast, while I made signs. I explained to Suzanne what each sign meant. I explained how the first step would be to clean out their toy boxes and toy cabinets to purge all unwanted and broken toys. Then after all that was taken care of, we’d take care of the bags. And IF, IF they were lucky, they might get to watch “Larryboy and the Yodelnapper” today, a dvd we rented from Netflix that we got Tuesday afternoon.

When I do this kind of big purge, we make all sorts of signs. A happy face of Suzanne for toys she gets to keep, a sad face for toys that are broken, have missing parts, or that she’s ready to say goodbye too, a wavy confused face for things she isn’t sure about, a sign for things borrowed from Grandma Beckie, and a sign for things borrowed from Nana. Ethan gets signs too. We also made a “This belongs to Ethan” sign and “This belongs to Suzanne” sign so that if they pull something out of a bag that belongs to the other, they aren’t constantly asking each other, ‘what do you want to do with this?’ instead, those piles are treated like another ‘bag’ at the end to be sorted.

We started at 7:30 and finished at 1 p.m. with sorting all the toys, and putting them all away. Hallelujah! So now, tomorrow is laundry day. I’m already tired thinking about it.