OCD

As you may or may not know, I have a few OCD tendencies. Nothing serious by any means and not about anything that makes sense, like cleanliness, but there are certain things that I like certain ways. 

John thinks his job is to break me of these tendencies. He usually succeeds. 

When I put his crayons away, I color coordinate them. He takes the box and dumps it out as often as possible. 

When I fold laundry, each shirt folds down to exactly the same size so that they will all fit perfectly in the drawer. He likes to pull my piles off of the table. 

When I sweep the floor, I go in a specific rotation around the room so that I am sure not to miss any sections. He tromps through my dirt pile, dragging it back into the sections that are done. 

When I play with legos, I build geometrically equal walls or pyramids made of layers in rainbow color order. John takes any legos that are stuck together apart, throws them into the container, and then dumps the container out. 

When I put his books away, I put them in order from smallest to largest. John pulls all of his books off of the shelf as often as possible. 

When I empty the dishwasher, I do all of the silverware first, the the glasses (smallest to largest), then all of the plates (smallest to largest), and then I group the extras as well as possible. John loves to help me unload the dishwasher, giving me one thing at a time with no order or in between time. In fact, I usually end up with a pile of extras on the counter because I didn't have time to put them away before he handed me the next items. 

When I put John's toys away, I try to organize them within the toy box. He pulls them all out and throws them on the floor, barely playing with any of them. 

His toy box usually looks like this: (half empty because they are strewn all over the house)

Well, this week I decided to try to put a little bit of order, at least into the toy situation. I separated his toys into groups and put them into clear little tubs. There is a ball box, two car tubs, soft blocks, hard blocks, rattles/noisemakers, stuffed animals, tools, and a few that didn't fit anywhere, so they all got thrown together. Now it looks like this: 

My goal is that he will choose one toy-tub to play with and clean it up when he is finished before getting a new one out. It sort of works for now because he can't open them himself yet, except for the ones that didn't fit. 

He has consistently chosen the tub of cars every time his toy box is open, proving even more that he takes after his dad. He usually dumps out all of the cars and then chooses two or three to drive around at a time. Today, after he was playing with his cars, I found something to prove that he takes after me at least a little bit. 

Even if he is not as OCD as me, at least he understands that there is such a thing as order. It comforted me just a little bit to know that maybe, someday, he may enjoy organizing things as much as I do. Maybe he is my kid after all. 

Too much to draw from a little row of cars?