Lessons learned from kids books

Does anyone remember The Berenstain Bears books? Also am I the only one that thought it was spelled BEAR-in-Stein? Mandy and I loved them so much and would get them from the library a lot.  I had a small Mama Bear figurine that I would carry around alla Rocky Pants style.  Geez I was a weird kid.  Anyways, so many life lessons learned from those books.

One of our favorites was The Bernstein Bears and the Messy Room.

Here is the summary: Brother and Sister have a disaster of a messy room.  Brother can't find things, toys are getting broken, fights happen, etc.  Brother and Sister get in trouble and Mama makes them clean their room.  So Mama, Papa, Sister, and Brother work together and organize everything.  At the end of the book there is this great illustration of the room all tidy with peg boards and labeled boxes.  I just loved looking at the details of the picture and seeing everything so neat and clean.  I literally feel excited just thinking about it. 

Thank the Lord for Google Images

Look at the Mama and her smug face!

That's how I like things.  Neat and clean. Always have.  Mandy and I would spend hours cleaning up the playroom in the basement and setting-up to play house and then would be too tired to actually play.  I wish I had a photo of the doll house in our room, it was an organized clutter masterpiece.

Seeing a clean space or participating in making things orderly is one of my favorite things.  And that feeling I got when I looked at the page from The Messy Room...that's exactly how I feel when I look at this:

On Sunday while Dan built the other dresser for the bedroom, I worked on combining his books and my books and other things to fill up my large bookshelf that we had hauled up to the apartment the day before.  Ahhhh.  It felt so nice to empty some boxes and put my stuff and his stuff together to make our stuff.  One thing to note, Dan does not own a single book that is not ministry related.  The guy doesn't "do" free reading.  But I have an inordinately large amount of youth group volunteering books so I can't complain about him.  

The thing about keeping things neat and clean is they don't even have to be "organized" just line things up in rough height order and run a duster over it once a week.  Blammo.  Step one for the guest room is done.