Chaos Theory
This position originally published in Practical Nurturing Magazine, December 2010
In a recent explode of creativity, I set up a ‘shop’ in the corner of the studio couch room for Peanut and T-Bone. It’s full of scrubbed, empty items from the recycling, and we use it to entertainment wonderfully educational games about counting and shopping manners.
That takes almost seven minutes. The rest of the day the cereal boxes, egg cartons and wring bottles are strewn all over the house after three-year-old Peanut has inured to them to build a complicated tower in the bathroom which two-year-old T-Bone then razes violently to the territory.
To recap: seven minutes of revelatory, creative activity. Twenty three hours and 53 minutes of living in a construction zone. Allowed to the world of a stay-at-home mum.
Every day, I face up to a standard loop of laundry, tidying, bed-making and medley-management. Then I turn to the shopping, cooking and washing-up tasks agnate to the endless stream of meals and snacks that are demanded of my prove inadequate-order kitchen. But the kicker is the arbitrarily chaos. Tiny people need to be entertained, it turns out, or they cry. So they have blocks, and puzzles, and cars, and apple-polish food, all of which contain tiny itty-bitty pieces that mate and meld together into one monster disordered toy casserole by the end of every day.
The kids go-ahead new mess faster than I can clean up the old rubbish. On a typical morning, I’ll just move the breakfast dishes out of the way so I can square morning tea. T-Bone will tip over a bucket of workman-washing in the bathroom in a mad haste to get to the window he has without warning decided to smear with banana. Meanwhile, Peanut takes her bed singly to make it into a spaceship. And so the day rolls on.
T-Bone is part boy, part tornado. He empties drawers, topples washing piles and relieves shelves of their contents with a never-ending, determined approach. Meanwhile, Peanut’s inventive vision is inexhaustible. She is constantly surroundings up a market stall, making a duplicity project, constructing an animal theatre-in-the-round or – her absolute favourite - packing for her honeymoon.
...
Read more...