Mom for Hire

One of my first goals in preparing to move is to declutter, organize, and clean every single room in my house. Then, and only then, will I have an accurate assessment of what needs to be boxed up to travel to Long Beach. The room I've most recently accomplished this goal in is Andrew's room. I'm quite proud of this, by the way. I don't have a proper "before" picture, but let's use this for comparison's sake:
To be fair, this was taken 4 years ago. However, the room had been clean, perfectly clean, 2 days before this picture was taken. (If you are in the mood for a little "I Spy" then look for the baby in the middle of the mess.)

In the 4 years since I've taken this picture, Andrew has gotten much better at making his room presentable. Translated, this means that he's gotten very good at shoving things under his bed and any other raised surface. He continues to perfect the talent of distributing small random objects quite evenly throughout his living space, especially legos, magnetix, lite brite pieces, etc.

It took me 2 days to complete, and I pulled more than 5 trash bags full of trash and old toys out of there. Oh, does it feel good! He actually doesn't have a whole lot of things he plays with apart from legos and Wii. This is my after picture:

The funny thing is, my kids appreciate me doing this so much that they don't even mind seeing bags and bags of stuff being taken out of their room. They don't even try to look at (or through) the bags to see what is in there.

In fact, Andrew was SO extremely grateful that he's been hugging me all day, thanking me all day, and as a matter of fact he just came up to me and told me "thank you" and offered me $5 for cleaning his room. What a sweetheart! I gave him a big hug and said "Thank you so much, but you don't have to pay me. You can keep you're money, I'm glad that you like your room."

It got me thinking. Receiving a sweet comment like that is one way that being a mom pays higher than anything else around. I'm so thankful that this is my job!