Cleaning up after oneself...

It's hard to instill in a child the ability and desire to clean up after oneself, especially if you don't possess that yourself.

*sigh*

And right now there are duplos all over my living room, a mess of papers in my bedroom, playdough toys (that she's not allowed to play with until the duplos are picked up) on the floor, and dress up clothes ALL OVER her room.

And I have people coming over in an hour and a half.

I want her to learn to clean up after herself, but I am lousy at doing it myself. I am NOT a good model in this area. And I tend not to see the mess until it's all over the place.

*sigh*

So I think I'm going to take Ellie by the hand and we are going to go clean up the house together right now. I didn't do such a good job at instilling the "play with one thing at a time and put it away before you get another toy out" rule today, but I can at least help her see that we need to clean up our toys when we're done playing with them. Right?

Just because we didn't nip it in the bud doesn't mean we can't still prune the tree... (or sproutling as the case may be, because she's not yet full grown tree yet... she's still only two and I have a lot more modeling to learn to do!)