After watching our lounge-about Friday evening show, “How Clean is your House?”, my 5-year old son and I decided that our playroom looked nearly as bad as the one just featured. The white-coat clad hosts visit grimy-filthy-messy-scary houses with much health warnings and incredulous shaking of heads, before getting the residents involved in the onerous cleaning tasks. So 5-year-old and I decided to take action, and emptied boxes of toys all over the floor, and decided which toys were to be rubbished, which to be given away (clean and unbroken but unused), and which ones kept and TIDILY put away on DUSTED shelves.*
Two items in the “give away” box were our little plastic mermaids, C-Blu (she has synthetic blue hair) and Shell (fluffy pink plastic-y hair – appropriate namesake of the global oil company). Their hair needed some attention, and after shampooing and conditioning each so that I could attempt to de-tangle, Shell looked positively pleased, though C-Blu was non-plussed.
In the process of fussing over them, I began to wonder if I should keep them… After all, there is sentimental attachment: my now 13 and 12 year old girls used to play every night in the bath with their lovely mermaids, and later my sons used them as victims, targets, hammers, etc. Plus, by the time the next generation comes along, plastic dolls with synthetic hair MIGHT be a thing of the past. We’ll be back to wooden dolls with wool hair and cotton dresses.
Keeping the auld things, of course, jars with the “clear out your closet and change your life” attitude. Am I hanging on to the wrong things for the wrong reasons? Am I burdening my karma by not “letting go”? The angst!
C-Blu and Shell are, meanwhile, doing what mermaids do best: lounging around admiring the view, from my dressing table instead of at the bottom of the toy basket. The only certainty at this point is that they won’t (intentionally) end up in a landfill.
*dusting technique from the show that is great for 5-year-olds: put an old pair of socks over your hands, moisten, and wipe off dusty surfaces! Satisfying results with white gym socks guaranteed!
