On Snooping and Cleaning Kids' Rooms

I'm currently reading a book called "Snoop: What Your Stuff Says About You." I had been hoping it would be pleasantly snarky and full of judgmental conclusions I can draw after scrutinizing people's bookshelves and CD collections. Unfortch, it reads like someone's Ph.D dissertation re-tooled as a pop psych book. Yawn. However, it dovetails nicely with my primary activity of the past day: super-cleaning the boys' rooms. At this point in their childhood, Oscar and Ike are one hundred percent dependent on their parents for food, clothing, lodging, transportation, etc. so it's always surprising to swamp out their rooms and find things I didn't expect to be there. The fruits of their black-market barterings with classmates, hoarded food (Ike), girls' phone numbers (Oscar. Age 7). Once, I was reading Oscar's journal (still OK, right? He's 7?) and discovered a page that said nothing but the words "I hate Mom!" More heartbreaking: a single sheet of folded 8.5x11 paper, labeled on the ourside, "Oscar's Laptop." Inside, hand-drawn screen and keyboard.

The poorly-lit photo you see above is a snap of Oscar's room, less than 16 hours after it was CLEANED. So clean that not a single Lego remained on the floor. His participation in the project was coerced by my agreement to move his bed into the position you see it here, jutting six inches into the doorway of his room and probably violating the fire code. Entropy has clearly taken hold. Picking up and organizing his many building kits simply kindles his passion to scatter the parts of those kits all over the now-empty pallette of his floor and engage in ever-more-Quixotic projects. (Note: Pallette: what an artist uses. Pallet: what they use at Costco to move around bales of paper towels. Palate: your sense of taste. None of my three readers may ever use these words incorrectly ever again.)