Day #61: A Space for My James

James and I are driving each other insane because we are so damn alike. In particular, helping him clean anything makes me a crazy person. I have to have his dad help him clean his room or we will kill each other. He likes to hoard things, gets distracted by progress, will play in mess. He's so much like me and especially like I was at his age.

I mentioned that we recently did a big desk swap around here. We all feel fortunate now that we did it before all this because as it turns out everyone has a better workspace now. 

Basically what happened is Josh got a good deal on a workbench, which is a better fit for him than a desk anyway. A year or so ago, he picked up this lovely wooden desk from a friend of his, his friend's grandfather's desk, and we moved it into my office to make an L-shaped working space for my typewriters and such. But it was never a good fit for my old desk which was small and bought for me for the old room under the eaves in the old house. So the theory became, Josh gets the work bench, I get his old desk to make my workspace more evenly matched and usable and James gets my old desk. We have this alcove off the kitchen by our back door...it's' not the most usable of space because there's no outlet and it's just far enough from the kitchen to be an inconvenient pantry. But there is a light back there. It had become one of those places in your house that has no purpose and therefore just amasses clutter. Josh cleared it out and moved my old desk in there for James when we did the swaparound and at the same time we were helping Grandpa do some cleaning out of his house and James inherited one of those three drawer plastic things you get at Target or wherever.

And then, like two weeks later, before everything was really completed, the world shut down. Now Josh's workspace is not just for his myriad of hobbies but is where he spends literally all his time for work and play and James is going to school online. It was so nice that James had a desk, but he had never really had time to move into it. It still had my stuff in its drawers and as for his plastic drawers they were just crammed with whatever had happened to be in his way. And he has to use this space. He sits there to do school work and I have to look at it from the kitchen. It was making me crazy and I really really really didn't want to have to clean it and organize it, with all the scraps all over the place...it just stressed me out to look at it.

But I was so happy when I realized I had a space of my own, organized the way I wanted it. And I realized I wanted that for James. He is handing all of this so well but his stress and anxiety have also been up. Everybody's has. Going to school online is super stressful, he needs and deserves a place of his own to do his work and keep his stuff and he so loves projects, it would be so nice for him to have  a place to keep his crayons and glue and scissors and stuff and tinker.

So he and I cleaned and sorted all afternoon. It was really important to me that he be the one to set it up so he would know what the system was and where everything was. But I knew he was way to overwhelmed to do it himself, even picking the garbage up off the floor was too much for him. So I sat with him and we did it together.

It went about like you'd expect. He whined and rolled around under the desk and told me how much he hates cleaning and that I should do it for him. But I tried to make it something he could have ownership of. We hung things he had made and painted on the walls for him to look at, we created a "memory drawer" for favorite things like drawings he has done or letters people sent him. I put all the things I usually ration, like paper and glue sticks, where he can reach them and promised he could have access if he promises to put them away properly and not use up all the paper on Day 1. 

And then, as he started to see the end and what was shaping up, he got very excited. He was rushing to put things away, he was seeing the clean space underneath. When it was done, he immediately wanted to do a project and he picked it all up when done.

When I was keeping my bullet journal...for like 2 months...I'm so not a good journal writer...I started having a section each day where I wrote down what I cleaned. Homemaking is such a frustrating gig and it is never done and you are always playing catch up. I decided to start celebrating what I was doing in hopes it would inspire me to do more, to stop the paralysis that happens when you just don't know where to start.

Well, one step at a time. There are still plenty of places that harbor messes, but after reclaiming the room of my own, where I sit right now, we reclaimed a place of calm and peace for James to have and he deserves it. I love my buddy so much. I hope he remembers the love more than the butting heads we keep doing. I hope he knows I'm proud of him and glad he has a space for his myriad of projects. I love that kid.

In other James news, we are thinking of different ways to keep school from being yet another thing we fight over. With a little help from my sister the special educator, we have a new system for practicing letter and number writing. With a nod to Sesame Street, which James now adores, we have a letter and number of the day. That way we can focus on challenge areas and not waste time on L and T. We are dong fun things with the letter, like making it out of play dough and writing it in shaving cream, and then we write it for real, but for fun. Today we had a battle of the letter M versus the number 6 to see which he could write more of in a defined space. He actually said to me, I didn't know writing could be this much fun! Tomorrow's letter is J so the plan is to place lower and upper case J's in airplane seats within the outline of an airplane and make J families. My sister also encouraged me to take one day off a week and just write for fun, no handwriting practice, no critique, just write stories or lists or whatever he wants. Zoom kindergarten is still a battle but to have one part of his learning day that isn't...that feels awesome.

Today's media consumption: we went on a mini-road trip, Josh had to go pick up a computer part and in an ongoing effort to leave the house we all rode along. To keep James occupied on that journey, I put the Charlie and the Chocolate Factory audiobook on my phone. He listened to it the whole trip and for an hour after we got home, we are FOR SURE going to do more audiobooks. We're going to put some on the iPad for him because I missed having my audiobook on my phone while he was listening, although I got it back. I'm still listening to Anne of Avonlea. I wasn't much in the mood for Flora & Ulysses today but I read a lot more of my prose poetry book Letdown and it is awesome. A little more Dick van Dyke Show. TV watching has been down since I've moved back into my office, so that's good.

Today I'm thankful for my James and his boundless creativity, audiobooks, a memory drawer, James art projects, Max kisses, Max giggles, Max naps on mama, road trips, writing, poetry, good health, and sunshine.