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[quote=Anonymous]i am a tidy freak and we live in an open concept house with no bedroom.  When DS (8) was a toddler and in K, it was easy to enforce the "clean up a toy when it's done or before bed" rule.  But now he's his own person and he shouldn't have to start and finish each task before bed or before starting another one -- any more than we do as adults.

He is a huge lego user - and has several huge sets. He builds and rebuilds them over and over, and his bigger sets (5000+ pieces) take a few weeks of after school building for several hours at a time.  No surprise, he gets bored after some time each night and wants to do something else.  It would be bizarre if i made him keep working on it over a  period of weeks before being "allowed" to pull out another toy.  Other stuff currently in active use in our home: an adult jigsaw puzzle he pulled out tonight that we both worked on for an hour, a small handheld logic puzzle game that he's been fiddling with while we watched jeopardy, and a few fully built star wars legos that he regularly returns to and acts out big battle scenes - so they end up in active use around the house.  I'm sure there is other stuff around the house too.

My activities that are currently out for my own use:  Embroidery at the foot of the sofa, the shared jigsaw puzzle that he pulled out and a stack of cards that i use every couple days.

Just like it would be weird and anxiety-inducing and over structured to make me finish and put away each activity before moving onto the next, it's weird to oversee his personal activities so tightly that he can't come and go from hobbies.  Again, he is a fully formed person at this age.  However, a couple times a week we do a "big clean" where we go back to mostly baseline.

And again, I am a neat freak and this is still where we ended up as a family. Definitely not messy by any stretch, but none of this BS "a toy goes away before a new one comes out" rule.  [/quote]

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