The Missing Shin Guard

Okay, I am going to be honest with you. As much as I hate to admit it, my kids are slobs. They really are. My wife and I have tried for years to get them to keep their room clean and nice, but it just doesn’t work. We harp on them, we give them consequences, we take stuff away, but nothing works. We try to be consistent in how we handle their sloppiness, but frankly, a lot of the time we just don’t have the time or the energy to fight the battle day after day, night after night.

We don’t have a lot of sympathy for our kids when they can’t find their stuff though, especially when it comes to their soccer gear. Every night after soccer practice, we remind them to put their cleats and shin-guards in their closet so they can find them before the next practice or game. Despite the reminders, the soccer gear is usually left scattered around the house (one cleat in the front room, the other in the back room, while one shin-guard is under the bed and the other is in the bathroom).

When my youngest son couldn’t find one of his shin-guards before practice this past week, my wife and I simply rolled our eyes and told him to keep looking for it. Of course, he swore up and down that he had put it in his closet with his cleats (which he had already found). Honestly, my wife and I didn’t believe him and scoured the house, looking everywhere except in his closet. As the minute hand on the clock ticked ever closer to practice time and tears ran down my son’s face, my wife relented and finally looked in the closet. Low and behold, she found the missing shin-guard, tucked away in the back corner of the closet where my son had thrown it. Turns out, my son decided to see if he could get all his soccer gear into his closet by throwing it in from his bed.

Although the shin-guard wasn’t put in the blue shoe bucket like it was supposed to be, it was in the closet. This is a step in the right direction, I guess.