genius

Our kids are normal. This means that they fail to clean out their backpacks after school, they forget to put their dirty laundry in a basket, when they put their folded clothes "away" they often merely shove most of them under their dressers, the books on their bookshelves are stacked horizontally and not vertically, usually their beds are not made, and equal portions of stray papers and broken toy parts in the toy boxes.

(This is *not* our home, but honestly, it's not too much of a stretch some days...) {Photo Credit}

: :  Someone please tell me this is indeed "normal."  : :

After I spend hours cleaning the whole upstairs with my children, organizing our spaces (granted it's limited space these days), I always end with a mini lecture on the importance of keeping our things clean and organized and how it shows respect blah blah blah.

So far my tactic hasn't worked well (shocking, I know).

Well tonight I could hear Jeff in the kids' rooms while I was nursing Fischer in our bedroom. He was in there for quite some time and when I was done with the baby (feeding/changing/putting to bed) I went to check on him.

I found that Jeff had cleaned (like really cleaned) their entire rooms; folded every piece of clothing and organized every.single.square.inch. of their spaces (it really looked nice!).

{Photo Credit}

 Before I could even yell at the kids to come and say, "What do you guys tell Daddy!?" Jeff pulls out his phone and starts taking pictures from every angle of the room (which, honestly, made me wonder WTHeck?), but I said nothing (see? I'm learning!).

After taking these pictures, he calls the kids up who immediately ooh and aahh over how great it looks and then he says to them, "I had a feeling you were going to appreciate your rooms looking all cleaned up like this...so I took some pictures of it for you. Tomorrow I'm going to print them off and hang them nicely on your wall so that every night before you go to bed you have a visual standard of what they need to look like. Mom and I expect you to take the time every.single.day. to bring them up to this standard before you crawl into bed so when we come in to do devotions and pray with you before you go to sleep you'll have a great space you can be proud of and we'll have nice clean rooms to come in to. You think you can do it?"

They said they could.

Genius.