go clean your room!

We live in a 3 bedroom house. Pretty normal.
We have 4 kids, 2 boys, 2 girls. So originally we had girls in one room, boys in the other. But about 4ish months ago we moved all of the kids into one room aka "the sleep room" and moved all of their books, games, puzzles, toys into the other room aka "the play room". This has worked out really great for us. On the weeks that Mason is home from visiting his dad the kids all wanted to sleep on the bunk bed in the boys room at night to chit chat, giggle and hang out anyways and now with London sleeping in there she has her own bed and they still get to be together. Betsey was put into the sleep room a few months ago as well, and it's working out really well because they respect her sleep time and do not wake her up. Also as the younger ones nap it gives space to the older kids to get to play and read together. I am a big fan of children sharing rooms. It teaches them to share and to respect others space and belongings. It also helps the children hold each other accountable. Our children are young enough that having boys and girls in the same room is still appropriate. But the downfall is that there is a lot of stuff in the play room to clean up each day and this has become a huge deal to my kids. It takes them forever every day, lots of crying, whining and discipline involved.
Yesterday was no exception. Finally after the millionth time of disciplining, raising my voice ( fail ) my husband going in and doing the same thing (fail) . I finally just realized that my kids don't know how to organize and put things away the way I would like them. They have never been trained to do it. They have had their own rooms with the things split up so there wasn't as big of a mess to pick up. So I went in there and sat down and showed Mason the proper way to put the books away on the book cases. I showed London how to put the puzzles in their bins, the dolls in the other and her dress up clothes in the right spot in the closet. I showed Rowan where his dinosaurs go, and where the firetrucks go on the shelf. It took 20 minutes.
I realized how many times I get so frustrated with my kids over things that I have not take the time to sit down and properly train them how to do & complete. I just automatically assumed that they would know where everything went and how to put it back where it came from but after 10 hours of playing off and on in a room you forget and they are young. I had to apologize. Today they made a mess before breakfast and I said lets do a quick clean up, it was done.....quickly.
amazing.
I'm sure I will still have to remind them of how to do things, but that's my job...to train my children.

Proverbs 22:6 "Train up a child in the way he should go; even when he is old he will not depart from it"