Day 1: The Prodigal Blogger...

I feel like I am peering into a dark cave or a wild canyon.

"Is anybody there...there...there...?"

What can I say? I've been busy. 

But something happened that has just kept pestering me, like a determined three-year-old, to blog.

Here's what happened.

I walked into my boys' bathroom the other morning and, well, sat down. This is the view from the, well, you know:

Two books, two pairs of shorts and one pair of boxers.  On. The. Floor.  More on the floor later, but for now, let's just focus on the reading material, shall we?

Before you get all "Aww, Calvin and Hobbes, my all time favorite" on me, may I remind you that the reader of this tome is about to turn fifteen?

The about-to-turn-eighteen-year-old is made of sturdier stuff:

That volume, partially obscured by boxers, is called Supercars.  Yes, Supercars.

I guarantee you these two books have been moving from the bathroom shelf to the bathroom floor for at least 18 months.  So, I found had two parenting dilemmas on my hands. 

One, how to get them to stop leaving stuff on the floor of what is actually a communal bathroom?  And two, how to get them to read something that they haven't already memorized?

And how to do this and maintain my commitment to underparenting? That is, to parent in such a way that I do as little as possible, but no less than necessary.

Because I have learned a thing or two in my 20 years of mothering, I decided to focus on the floor problem and hope that would somehow magically take care of the reading material problem.  When they emerged for breakfast I informed them that there was a new sheriff in town, one who would no longer tolerate things being left on the floor of communal spaces.  Said sheriff would henceforth confiscate anything left on the floor and the owner would have to pay an as yet undetermined fine for its return. This seemed to me a most elegant mothering approach.  All I was signing up for in the way of action was to pick up the detritus on the floor and hide it somewhere good.

 The boys nodded their heads blearily over their Grape Nuts.  They have seen me like this before.

But did they pick a single item off the floor when they left for school?  They did not.

I'll continue the story in my next post, but in the meantime, I'd love hear your ideas as to how else I might have approached this dilemma, given my commitment to underparenting?

If, that is, there are any of you left out there.