Always look on the bright side of life...

Today’s Daily Challenge ("Look on the Bright Side") was to turn a negative into a positive:
Find time today to reflect on something negative that happened recently which is still upsetting you. Are there any lessons to be learned from the experience? Is there something you could do differently next time to get a different outcome?

I have been pretty happy lately and have tended to brush off a lot that was bothering me and move on. I remember getting annoyed at the inconvenient scheduling issue at my OB’s a few weeks ago, but I got to finish my book. (Same with having to take the 3 hour glucose test…gave me plenty of time to read.)

However, the one issue that does grate at me at a lot is the state of the basement/toy room. I know it’s my kids’ space and that at least it’s not invading on the rest of the house, but it drives me crazy when I spend a whole afternoon cleaning and organizing EVERYTHING without much help from my own kids and then I look a week later and it’s all in disarray again. I vented about it on Facebook a few weeks ago because it was bothering me that much. I think my friends have picked up on my frustration and are more diligent about making sure their kids clean up before they go home. I definitely appreciate that outcome. However, it doesn’t resolve the misplacement of items that took me forever to find and put back in place the first time around. It hit me the most the other day, when my younger son wanted to play with a game and some of the pieces were missing. He seemed so disappointed and it made me upset that people don’t have enough courtesy and just take things out and scatter them everywhere. I could combat this by telling my friends to tell their kids to only play with one thing at a time and put everything back together before taking out something else. I’m not sure how much the kids would remember it, but it gets me so annoyed in the meantime. As this new baby is going to be here in the next month or so (b’shaah tovah), I’d like for them to have toys that aren’t completely mismatched or missing parts. I’m glad I put some baby toys aside already, but there’s still a lot they won’t get to play with because of this type of situation. Again, I need to remind myself that the positives are:

1. The stuff is mostly contained in the basement, leaving the rest of the rooms (aside from their bedrooms) toy free.
2. People, including kids, are making the effort to help clean up more often these days, instead of leaving it all for me.
3. There’s always Freecycle or donation programs if the toys get too out of hand. I can also replace items at a very low cost from the thrift store.
4. This shows that my children have friends who enjoy playing at our home.