The Happiness Committee or Clean your room

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Implements of torture (or so say some...)

Okay. My first born is a son. Whom I love dearly, as I do all of my four children. Of course. I have always said that sometimes I wish I could put all four of them in a bag and shake them up so that all of everything could be distributed equally. Now that they are adults, I no longer feel this way and realize the extremes of each of their personalities is their "design feature", so to speak.

Anyway, back to my point. My son is the chairman of the morale committee where he works (I could not make this up) and in this "position of power" he sends out emails to alert the staff to what is coming next in their work week. He calls these epistles "News from the Happiness Committee", which makes me laugh. Very hard.

Someone he knows has been taking his email messages and producing short videos with voice over. Link to video: Happiness Committee Clean-up Day

(If you take a look at the video, you will get a bird's eye view of what I was up against as a parent. A very verbally adept young man that would make me laugh and would get himself off the hook.)

Why is this all so funny?  Because when the children were little I spent many hours getting them to "clean up" their rooms, I'll bet you did the same with any progeny you might have had too. It is a thankless task. Now, here he is (the king of resistance to cleaning his room as a child) encouraging folks to tidy their office space, it makes a mother's heart sing to think he is trying to accomplish this very same task now that he is an adult.  Redemptive... almost.

True, when I was attempting to teach my young'uns that "cleanliness was next to godliness" I was an overwhelmed mother of four children, which arrived in five years (what was I thinking?!) Most likely, I was not very funny and had few visual aides other than attempting to lead by example. Which by the way, I still believe is the best approach. Unfortunately, I think I have been more of a "do as I say and not as I do" mother then I ever realized at the time. Sigh.

None the less, it is always thought provoking when I see what my children have brought to adulthood from their childhood. I hope, that along with wanting their living space to be tidy, (or tidier then it was when they were children) they also brought with them the fact:  they are loved, even when they have not tidied up their room.