Monday, December 04, 2006

Cause and effect

Question: where do most accidents occur?
Answer: in a domestic environment. More especially, in bedrooms belonging to untidy children.

The floor of my children's bedroom contains: underbed box lids, guns, protruding underbed boxes, cars, clothes, bits of castle, hidden socks the likelihood of which ever being found is a matter of speculation, Pokemon cards, Lego, Brio track bits, teddies, sharp bits of plastic which have fallen off crappy plastic toys from China, CDRoms, books, scrap paper, pictures (on scrap paper), pens, pencils, and other sundry bits of an anonymous nature but which probably belong to some game which is totally useless without said bits.

My youngest stubbed his little toe on one of the protruding underbed boxes last night and spent this morning in the emergency department of the local CHU (university hospital) making sure he hadn't broken anything as he would have spent the next 5 weeks in plaster if he had!

I mentioned to him that had his bedroom floor been tidier, we would not at that moment be trying to fit his shoe onto a swollen toe made bigger by a huge alcohol-imbibed dressing held in place by a bandage and he was lucky it wasn't an itchy, annoying plastercast. He was strangely unconcerned and detached about such an observation.

This evening, I removed various guns into their cubby hole, cars into the car box and books back onto the shelves. Everything has a place so that parts of things can be found and made into something because they are with all the other bits and bobs they need to make whatever it is they make; and cars, figures, animals, Lego, Playmobil, plastic balls, clothes ALL have an allotted box, drawer, cubby hole. Does it make any difference? Not in the slightest.

Mind you, I can talk. I am hardly the world's tidiest person, and my mother used to complain I had to take a running jump from the door to get onto my bed when I was a teenager because the floor had not see daylight for many moons (as it were).

Still, I never ended up in the emergency department on a Monday morning having X-rays of my feet because I had a huge, painful swelling on my right little toe. It must have been the practice I had jumping onto the bed that enabled me to do a long jump of 4.31m when I was 13...

Cause and effect. There's no escape!

12 comments:

  1. Squashed in car door fingers, seriously stubbed toes and broken teeth when flying over handlebars are Mother's delight when they have boys - and sometimes with girls too.

    Don't want to worry you....but it gets worse with time......small children, small bobos...big boys, big bobos...and sleepness nights when they start driving!

    I was in Paris when my youngest son passed his driving test, on his eighteenth birthday, and I knew he was going to shoot out of the garage with his car on the spot.....ouuups. Sweet memories now, but hairaising at the time.

    Boys will be boys....but Mummys, even with big married boys who are parents still worry about the way they can mess up the beautiful work we did when fabricating them to start with, all soft and clean and podgy with no broken anything!

    NG

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  2. There is no known remedy for junk and kids' bedroom floors - I have tested every idea in the world, and there was still havoc!

    And as NG says, the bigger the boys (and girls) the bigger the accidents - last year my son knocked himself out trying to do a 360 degree turn whilst skiing off the roof of a chalet, and my daughter came off her skis at 140km/h in a speed skiing competition, but went on to win the amateur event!

    And they wonder why I have grey hair?!

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  3. I think there are children who are born tidy, others who have it imposed upon them by a manic mother, and the majority who have no interest in seeing the colour of the bedroom floor.

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  4. Hi Sarah
    I notice that you and quite a few of my favourite bloggers (which now includes Louise) have opted to
    for the "Show Comments in a pop-up window". Is there are particular reason for preferring this ? Personally I find it a bit of pain, because the window always defaults down to the log-in details first, meaning one then has to scroll back up to enter one's Comment (which I tend to do first). But that's not all - I often find that the pop-up box seems to have disappeared. It's then found hiding behind the home page.

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  5. Brilliant. Fixed. Just like that !

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  6. PS: And guess what? I only had to enter the security code letters once, instead of twice with that infernal pop-up window. Does anyone know any conceivable benefits of that pop-window ? I'll be darned if I can see any !

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  7. I have no preference either way, so I'm happy to give the pop-ups a miss and try the page format. Especially if it means entering in the word check only once!

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  8. Hi Sarah,
    I've spent countless hours down the Urgences with suspected fractures after skateboarding sessions but the one thing I'm really happy about is that I kept both kids off scooters and motorbikes.....so far!!
    And the bedroom? From my own experience there comes a moment when they want to invite friends and the bedroom is too messy so they have to clear it up. My boy was about 15 when that happened but HE cleared it up not me.
    Angela

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  9. Ah, they get to the point where they are embarrassed about the mess? Mine have not got there yet. They'll happily invite friends in and paddle through the detritus in search of stuff.

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  10. Sarah I'm not surprised. You have been practising jumping into bed from a very early age.

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  11. Predictable as ever, Roo.

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  12. Yes, they do become embarrassed about mess as Angela said - but at 15 they are embarrassed about everything, especially their parents! Mine went into a frenzy of activity the other evening (even the Dyson was pressed into service) - I'd forgotten that this weekend there is a competition in the village and then party night, so this must be a forerunner to a sleep-over that has been organised here - of course I shall be the last to be informed, so better buy in a load of pasta for the weekend!

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