Reclaiming Space.

An underrated parenting milestone is the day you can finally claim your living room back. I barely remember what my living room looked like without a haphazard assortment of toys, games and books strewn around it. My son recently turned 10 and we’ve been in this house almost as long. There have been several attempts at tidying over the years, of clearing out old junk (saying goodbye to all the noisy, brightly-coloured plastic was a blessed relief), which was quickly replaced by new junk. But we stopped short of a concerted effort to really make the living room nice.

In the early years it seemed pointless buying beautiful furniture that would inevitably get barrelled into, knocked over or scrawled upon. Our son has been old enough to play independently in his room for a long while but he likes hanging out downstairs, and often brings down toys, puzzles, whatever he’s playing with at the time, which inevitably get left down here up until the next big clear out. Now he’s at the age where he’ll help tidy up after himself — when asked, of course. He’s not a freak of nature — and we realised he’s grown out of a lot of the old games that have accumulated down here over time. Now we can start thinking about how we would like the room to look and feel. And he can appreciate it too.

Not that we have total freedom to buy nice things, of course — we still have a cat.