SueG, Cara, and the little one

Each week I spend one day with my friend SueG. She works 12 hour night shifts at the local children's hospital, two days on, two days off, so she sleeps during the day. On the second day of her day off she stays up and we hang. My kids know not to get sick on SueG days. Lately, we have added her 5 year old daughter to the mix as her Pre-K education from the state of Florida has ended. Instead she is getting an education from us.

First she hung all day with Elliot while we painted my kitchen. She has an older brother who bosses her around so she enjoys coming over to boss Elliot around. He loves to follow her because she plays with him and usually has food at his level. It is a win/win situation for both of them, except when Elliot has had enough of her. Then she was in the kitchen. "Miss Cara, Elliot won't play with me. Miss Cara, Elliot isn't listening. Miss Cara, Elliot made a big mess in the playroom."

Second time around she accompanied us on our errand running. We spent a long time at Sam's Club pushing her around in the large carts. She is very much the inquisitor asking probably one hundred questions in the time I'm with her. I gave up counting her questions at 35 as they were coming more rapidly then I could count.

Today was spent de-cluttering and cleaning her bedroom. I am an expert in this area (well, maybe not an expert like those on TLC) so SueG asked if I would help her work on Sydney's room. I don't normally do this job with the children around as they tend to whine when you toss things in the garbage, but Sydney is now in the weekly club and this was our weekly project.
She did give a horrified look when I requested a trash bag once I entered the room, but she quickly got into the spirit of the cleaning process. In fact, she was better then her mother.

We started in her drawers. I would hold up some shorts and say, "Oh, that isn't going to fit her." SueG would argue, "That fits her!" Sydney would try them on and say, "Nope! Miss Cara is right these are too tight!" And she would chuck them into the pile for the "poor children".

She would do the same thing with her toys. She had so many small bits and pieces of toys that SueG was overwhelmed as I started dumping bins of items on the floor, but Sydney was right in there opening up containers and dumping them all out. We started in her closet with her books and moved on to large items such as houses and barns. Eventually we had bins for her jewelry, her barbies, her Polly Pockets, her zu zu pets, her play food, etc. If I picked up something I thought was nonsense and threw it into the "poor children" pile, her mother would take it out and say, "this goes to her such n' such play thing" and would put it back into the large sift pile. Sydney would then take it out, find the play thing it went with, and say, "I don't use this anymore so the poor children can have this" and bam! back into the "poor children" pile it would go.

We spent 2 1/2 hours in her bedroom cleaning and de-cluttering and Sydney worked along side of us the entire time. I would have preferred her mother had watched television and left the job to Sydney and me.

We got the room put together and I told Sydney that each night the room stayed clean she would earn 25 cents from her father. She wrinkled her nose, scoffed, and told me, "Daddy won't do that." She then wiped her hands on her shorts, clapped them together, and announced, "Now let's go get working on Alex's room!"

I'm thinking of hiring her full-time when I go into the de-cluttering business.