Little Boys Are The Most Inefficient Creatures

% efficiency = useful energy / total energy used

My biggest pet-peeves are repetition and inefficiency, each creates the other and they equally bug me. Seven years ago when my career was in the work force I would read up on how to work efficiently and learned you should never touch a paper or email more than once. When I became a housewife I tried to apply this theory to my home. If I am going down the hall to do laundry, I take whatever needs to be put away in that direction of the house and put it away as I make my way to the wash room. This has always worked for me and I have been able to keep a neat home with little effort. That is, until I had a boy 15 months ago. My four daughters are all fairly neat themselves and never found much joy in pulling everything in their wake out of cupboards, off of shelves, or out of toilets. None of them seemed strong enough to remove obstacles in front of the game cabinet where small dice hide and minions of game cards abide. I was lulled into the belief that you don’t baby-proof your home, you home-proof your baby by consistency and an open eye. I realized yesterday as I had made my trip down the hall to the washroom putting things away and then cycling a load of laundry, that in that short time my son had removed everything I had just put away and decorated my home with it. I pondered for a moment if now was the time to finally buy all the baby-proofing gadgets for my cabinets and drawers. I calculated in my head the equation for efficiency. “I am going to probably spend around $100.00 on all the locks I would need, is that less than the energy I am spending picking all of this up 50 times a day? And what of the efficiency, as far as heating costs, having to close most of the doors on our main floor?” I then and there decided not to buy the gear, as I realized my son is now 15 months and I have about 3 more months until he is old enough to figure out how to undo the latches on the baby-proofing gadgets with the same extreme efficiency that he now figures out how to with brute, boyish force remove the obstacles I have placed around my home. Plus, he just has so much fun doing it.

So my new equation is:

Happy little boy = a messy house / $0 spent