The Best Part of the Day

I had two best parts of the day yesterday. First was helping Kara clean up her room; second was playing tennis with Kal.

Kara's room had reached near hazmat level. "Go clean up your clothes" produces a different result for her than the picture I have in my head.

I picture that each item of clothing is either hung up, folded and put away, or tossed in the hamper. Sounds simple.

What I find after she's done is the freshly laundered clothes in one corner mostly away from the carpet of worn and tossed clothing over the majority of the floor.

Peeled off socks, still half-rolled, and pants with one leg inside out are commonplace.

So... yesterday we faced the wreck... again. This isn't the first time Supermom has had to reverse tornado the room.

I set the timer for an hour, intent on just getting as far as we could in that time.

I sent her into the cave under her bed to fetch every last little bit of whatever was under there. I want to see corners and baseboards when I look under beds.

We sorted through all the clothes first, while tossing all the obvious trash into a bag. Little by little, we saw carpet!

She ran off after the hour was up, and I kept working for awhile, sorting more who-knows-what and vacuuming.

The best part was when I called her later to come look at her room. She loves cleanliness and order and gave me the sweetest hug and thanks for helping her.

Now we need a daily room check so it doesn't get so bad anymore.

Random tennis ball picture

For Kal's part of the day, he had asked me to take him to the courts and play tennis with him. I wanted at first to put him off because it wasn't part of my plan for the day, but I overrode that first instinct and took him.

It made his day, and mine, too! He's on the school team, so he was able to coach me as he'd been coached on form and serving and rules.

I never learned to play, though I'd always wanted to. Now my son is teaching me!

We both agreed that playing together was the highlight of our day, and we want to do it many more times.

One more note: Kal and I were relating to each other not as mother and son, but as coach and student during tennis. It really was refreshing not to be his "boss" for a bit and just enjoy how he teaches and learn from him. He's quite a lot of fun.

My son has such care, compassion, and respect with teaching, giving a vast amount of grace for mistakes. It's something I rarely get to see when we're in the typical mother/son roles.