Mom’s been working on the kids to clean up the basement. I managed to brow beat Corwin in to doing part of it Friday while Mom was out with Charles and Alice. Today, Mom tried to get Charles to do so cleaning, possibly because most of the mess is Charles related. Charles was not up for any cleaning. His first excuse was that he was “too tired”. After that excuse didn’t work and Mom kept pestering him, he pulled out his trump card — he made a sign. He got Corwin’s music stand and a big piece of paper, drew on it a bit and then put it up in the basement, announcing “this sign say do not clean the basement”. He became very insistent that not only should he not clean up, but no one should do so. After all, he (and other children) want to play with the toys and it’s inconvenient to have to pull them off shelves. When this approach didn’t work, Charles labeled the middle section the “baby area” and re-interpreted his sign to mean “don’t clean the baby area” because, you know, babies want to play with the toys and they can’t get them off the shelves. When Alice wandered over to play in the baby area, Charles refused to let her because “the baby area is closed for not cleaning”.