A Plus

I wonder if it's a natural human reaction to try to organize things. I often tell my Young Women that people will always judge you by the way you dress because our brains understand the world by relating to previous experience. For example, if someone is wearing head-to-toe black leather and is covered in piercings and tattoos, our brains automatically label them as an outsider, potentially mean, and someone not to be approached. This may be totally inaccurate, but that is how our brains cope with the unknown. This is the reason I really try to avoid message tees for my girls. But that's a different post.

This need to put things in boxes serves us well in the Stephenson family. While I wish it made us keep the house cleaner, it means that things we like doing, like puzzles and logic games, are easier. We got this game for Christmas, and all of us love doing it before bed:Thanks, Grandma, for such a fun (and challenging!) game.

The downside to this is what my mother likes to call our type A personality. This is inherited largely from my side and my mom calls it that because she doesn't like the more Freudian word beginning with the same letter, the same word that always makes Kelly shy away from Angus beef. It is this trait that makes me sometimes organize my plastic cups according to the colors of the rainbow, or makes my brother organize all his work shirts by color (sorry, Steve). I was equally delighted and horrified to see that I have passed on the type A gene to my girls:
This scene greeted me last Saturday and they were so proud of it. Lizzie won a big container of jelly beans at a birthday party, lest you think that maybe I bought all of these. I could have, but I didn't. And now that I know about their type A tendencies, I'm planning on introducing them to the linen closet this weekend. It could use some help.