This is either the worst job cleaning out a shoe closet I've ever seen, or my five-year old son, Logan, is the smartest kid ever given a chore to do around the house.  I got home from work Saturday afternoon to discover shoes scattered across the lawn.  I thought immediately that my wife had either just gone on one of her epic cleaning fits where everything not in its correct place gets the ol' heave-ho out the door, or we got robbed by the clumsiest shoe thieves ever.

I got home from work to find I've either been kicked out of my house without knowing, or someone decided we needed some new lawn decorations. Photo by a very puzzled Jamie Garrett
I got home from work to find I've either been kicked out of my house without knowing, or someone decided we needed some new lawn decorations. Photo by a very puzzled Jamie Garrett
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Turns out I was wrong on both guesses.  Logan had been asked to help clean out the shoe closet.  As I've mentioned in previous posts we're preparing our house for a move, and there's no way we're going to sell the house if the first door they open upon coming into the house is a mess of a shoe closet.  I'm not here to cast blame, but let's just say I don't have 18 pairs of various black shoes for different occasions.  I have tennis shoes, sandles, a pair of brown shoes & a pair of black shoes.  That's it!!  There are some of my older shoes in the closet, which is good enough reason to clean it out.  Those funky things should have been cleaned out with a HAZMAT suit zipped up tight.

I'm not exactly sure what directions Logan was given, but clearly he had Spongebob on the brain because the job didn't get finished.  From the looks of things the job not only didn't get finished, it looks to have gotten worse than before.  I could at least find matching shoes before.  Now it looks like my sock & underwear drawer, a free-for-all of unmatched items serving no purpose.

While the shoe closet has never exactly been a sterile environment, when I left for work that morning I swear I was able to see the floor of the closet at the very least. Photo by Jamie Garrett
While the shoe closet has never exactly been a sterile environment, when I left for work that morning I swear I was able to see the floor of the closet at the very least. Photo by Jamie Garrett
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From the best investigating I could do into the shoes on the lawn, I figure Logan was told to "find the older shoes not being worn and throw them out".  If you're a parent you know that's not at all a specific enough order for a five-year old to compute.  That makes me think maybe the job was passed on to him from his older brother.  For some reason, despite all the physical pain and mental torment he's put through by Tyler, he loves his older brother.  He even went so far as to pay Tyler for useless crap being cleaned out of his own closet because Tyler said he needed more money to buy a new computer charger.  There's a sucker born every minute.

Whoever gave the initial order (Erica or Tyler), they didn't give nearly enough instructions on what should go and what should stay.  Just for inventory purposes, I'll tell you there were six shoes on the lawn when I got home.  Not six pairs.  Six shoes.  None had a matching shoe on the lawn.  Two of the shoes were shoes still being worn on a regular basis by my wife or me.

After a good laugh about the shoes being on the lawn I told Logan to just go ahead and bring them back inside so that we can keep the shoes that are still being worn.  I went on with my day and didn't think anything more about it until later in the evening when I took the trash out and noticed the shoes that had been on the lawn were now in the trash.

This is either Logan turning into his older brother, which is to say fairly worthless with household chores, or it's the best way ever to get out of future work.  I say that because there's not a chance in hell I'll ever ask Logan to clean out the shoe closet again.  He's done exactly what we all should do when asked to complete a task that could very well lead to future tasks... he tanked it.  Had I intentionally tanked it the first time I did the laundry with my new wife 12 years ago, I'm fairly certain I wouldn't be in charge of the underwear brigade every day of my life.  He's either brilliant, or he's going to be a big pain in the ass with chores for the next decade.

 

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