I came home from work and started to make lunch, while lunch was cooking,I had checked our kids' bedrooms to see if they had been cleaned like I have begged for weeks for them to do. Two of the four still live home. Daughter number three is 19-yrs old, she makes hoarding and being unorganized look like an Olympic Event. If being a slob could bring home the gold, our girl would be a champion. This girl saves everything and anything. She would save a fart if she could. Her room looks like an atomic bomb has gone off, and this is after she has cleaned!! I get so aggravated with her,I now just keep the door shut. I can swear I hear things scuffling around under her bed. It must be the dust bunnies, and since she hasn't truly cleaned like I would clean, I have seen them morph into the size of Dobermans. It's pretty scary when you have to call your doctor to make sure that your tetanus shot is up-to-date before attempting to enter that pit that she calls "A Bedroom." I walk tall and usually carry a big stick or whatever I can find with substance that is lying on her floor. I never enter without having something in hand for my own safety and well being. Her room looks nothing like the rest of the house. I have never seen a kid procrastinate at being a procrastinator before. To look at her, she doesn't have a hair out of place, no wrinkles to her clothes, she is so clean, she squeaks. But her room tells another story.

And then there's our 15-yr old son, child number four, he's our last. After all, four is enough. I am not a breeder and being pregnant is not a sport. I had such great hopes for him. I thought if I praised him for cleaning his room, and keeping his toys picked up when he was little, that the cleaning gene I had inherited, would then be passed on down to him. Wrong!! Some how everything took a turn in the wrong direction once he became a teenager. The once quiet and reserved son that I bragged about, has now turned into one of those kids that you wish you had duct tape for. If it weren't for that mouth of his, he'd be as close to an angel as a parent could hope for. Now don't get me wrong, all of my kids are good kids. None of them have caused hubby or myself any real grief. They tend to like to wind me up a little bit. If I say it's red, they will say it's blue, just to get a reaction out of me. But all in all...we are pretty lucky. Every night I ask our son, "Did you take your dirty clothes downstairs to the laundry room?" Reply: "I will." The next morning after he leaves for school, there is the laundry, sitting there strewn around his room like a wild bachelor party just occurred. Clothes everywhere. I can't decipher what's clean and what's dirty. Hubby says to smell them. Hell no! These were worn by a 15-yr old boy who is a jock. Jocks do not smell pretty after a practice or a game. When you see fumes permeating off of a pile of clothes, that is your warning to put on your goggles and pick them up with gloves and handled with extreme care. These items should now be considered as hazardous material, at least until they hit the washing machine, and then onto the dryer.