When I was a kid, my brother and I had some exclusive space in the basement to play in. It was chilly down there at times, being a 100-year-old house, but it was still a comfortable place to mess around. I used to pull the TV cart up to the side of a cheap tent and play Star Raiders on the Atari 2600. We had steel shelves that acted as high rises for everything from our stuffed animals to G.I. Joe's Cobra forces.
But there were times, periodically, when my mom would insist that we clean up. Now, understand, especially when it comes to G.I. Joe figures and vehicles, there were often battles in progress. Setting it all up the way you wanted was a lot of work. Since no one ever had to cross through that space, I couldn't understand why it had to be cleaned up other than to satisfy some desire to bring order to something viewed as disorderly.
As a parent myself now, I remind myself of this all of the time. Simon likes to spread out, and while his style of play is becoming more about pretending (finally), there's still a lot of structure and organization that he engages in, typical of ASD kids. That means "parking" a lot of cars in lines. In fact, tonight he did so separating the Hot Wheels cars from the non-Hot Wheels cars (I wish I could take credit for instilling that in him, because there is a quality difference). He has some things set up in both our front room and the living room that he considers theme park attractions. He runs cars, and now his Disney tram, from one room to the other. One of the attractions is actually a K'nex roller coaster. He uses wooden blocks to make platforms, dividers, roads, etc. It all makes sense to him.
Honestly, I think our house has more than enough room for three people, and while there are times when I feel like I need to have some living space be more orderly and grown up, I try very hard not to just arbitrarily force him to clean up. If it gets stagnant, and it usually does, I'll ask him to put stuff away, but otherwise I try hard to be zen about letting him do his thing. I dunno, maybe it's because he's an only child, maybe because his style of learning is different, maybe because his imaginative play is under-developed.
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