Messy, messy, messy

Sometimes the little people who come traipsing through our house are a little judgmental of all the chaos going down up in here. Not usually the ones who come from families with 4+ children but certainly the ones who come from family with 2 or fewer children. And I get it. We're a bit of a mess.

To be fair, when Zoë had gone for a playdate at her friend's house last week she asked her mom whose job it was to sweep the floor...because that person had clearly not done their job in a while. But the mom just laughed it off because she's spent quite a bit of time at our house and knew that sometimes (or always) our floor sweepers slack off as well.

Anyway, this one particular friend always has a comment about something. He'll walk inside and say, "Wow! My mom only lets me have one pair of shoes out at a time! Y'all have so many shoes out!"

And I'll say, "Well, we haven't gotten around to tidying the entry way yet today. Take your shoes off and go on down to the basement."

And then I'll tally up the number of shoes out and realize that we basically also have one pair of shoes out per child...it just happens to look like a billion shoes to him (sometimes it feels like a billion shoes to me, too (and sometimes it probably legitimately is a billion pairs of shoes)).

One day he happened to stumble through our front door on a Saturday morning when the kids were having a highly motivated day and were right in the middle of their Saturday chores (because we do sometimes clean up our messes).

"Whoa!" he said, standing in the clean entry way, looking at all the clean rooms around him. "Y'all do clean your house! It looks very nice!"

"Thanks," I said.

He's basically hilarious.


The other day he was down in our basement where the girls are in full-on crafting mode this weekend. They found Grandma's stash of needle point supplies, rummaged through her old pattern books, and have decided to piece together a little homestead play set. Their goals is to have it finished by Christmas. We are drowning in yarn.

Friday night I went a little ballistic over the state of the basement and so the kids (with Andrew's help) had a cleaning party down there (while I got Zoë and Alexander ready for bed (Zoë helped for a little while but started driving everyone else crazy so had to be removed from the picture)), so when he came over on Saturday the basement was clean except for the train set that Benjamin had pulled out again (nothing like a clean room to inspire play) and yarn remnants everywhere. The girls had pulled out all our boxes of yarn (we have three of them because we took Grandma's entire stash because no one else wanted it) and so there were skeins of yarn and boxes of yarn and little snippets of yarn pretty much everywhere.

But other than that the basement was clean!

"Wow," our little friend remarked. "Y'all have a lot of yarn."

"Don't you have yarn?" Benjamin asked.

"No," our friend answered wistfully. "They...don't let me be creative."

And I thought to myself, "Self, your house might be Pandora's Box of Chaos. But at least it's a creative mess."

Perhaps I won't worry too much that my house looks like it's been ransacked by an army of tiny Picassos when this little friend comes over because (a) it, ummm, most likely has been and (b) it sounds like, perhaps, he wants to dig into that yarn and make a big ol' creative mess himself.

So maybe I'll let him the next time he comes over.