ANALYZING TIDINESS

I don't understand my children! (Who does?) They are not the tidiest of little humans - Marcel is probably average, Charlotte on the other hand will need to study really hard at school because she'll need to earn enough to pay staff when she's older, she's the messiest child I ever met. She has an open empty toy box that you can't reach for the toys in front of it. She has an empty laundry basket you can only just see behind the pile of dirty clothes less than 5cm from it on the floor. On a good day I nag quietly (and get ignored). On a bad day I jump up and down and scream and shout and threaten (and get ignored).
But here's the thing - Léon has been spending the past month or two crawling around causing chaos. One day last week he took all the cds off the shelf in the library, Marcel walked by and spontaneously picked them up and put them back - I didn't ask him to, they didn't block his path, they didn't belong to him - Wow! He happliy cleared Léon's mess whereas his own is a different matter. However a more shocking thing was to happen at the weekend. Léon emptied the kitchen tins cupboard. Charlotte was playing outside and skipped in through the kitchen door. She saw the mess, skipped over and put all the tins away, unasked. Now she hadn't seen Marcel tidy the cds last week so she too has an innate sense that somehow cleaning Léon's mess is acceptable. This is a child who needs to be tortured for a week just to put a single sock in her own laundry basket.

Weird!