Life is messy- really messy!

    I woke up early this Saturday morning.  I got up with the baby at 6 am, when she woke up to nurse and then refused, despite all my encouragement, to go back to sleep.  She was raring to go, I was exhausted.  Slowly the other children woke up too, joining me and the baby in the family room and before I knew it I looked around at the state of my house and stared in disbelief.  It reminded me of a children's show my oldest daughter used to love when she was a toddler.  “The Big Comfy Couch”, was a very silly show about a clown and her couch, and at the end of each episode the clown would stand on her couch and scream-”Who made this big mess?”  and all around her you would see a disaster of toys that, of course, she was responsible for.   My family room was a similar disaster and my thoughts were exactly the same, “Who made this big mess?” 
    In the foyer there was a ball of assorted beach towels from our trip to the beach the night before, a trip which was cut short when my son stepped on something under the water and cut his foot.  After bleeding all over the sand, his father, and a few baby wipes we found just a teeny tiny cut on his heel but ended up throwing everything quickly back into the van and coming right home anyway.   I vaguely remember dumping the towels at the front door in our attempt to clean the kids up but somehow, in the chaos, the towels were forgotten and left there all night.  In addition to the beach towels that I never quite got around to, a basket of clean but not yet folded laundry sat on the end table.  It, too, got sort of dumped and forgotten, though I cannot even remember what distraction prevented that job from being completed.   The baby’s toys were everywhere, she, of course, had no interest in them but was instead crawling over and over to the kitchen (being dragged back to the family room every time by her siblings who were trying to help me keep her out of trouble) to investigate the cereal the big kids had dropped during breakfast.  Someone had added a few mixing bowls and Tupperware containers to the pile of baby toys, obviously in an attempt to entice the baby to stay put for a minute or two.  There were, as there always are at my house, library books on the couch, the loveseat, the chair and the coffee table, and a few more on the floor near the magazine rack we try to keep them all in.  For good measure, a few of our own books were also strewn about the room in various spots.   As if books were not enough, a big sloppy pile of food magazines sat right next to the baby toys, evidence of the grocery list I had been working on but never finished.   A stray baseball cap was tossed in one corner, pillows were stacked in another, and a box of markers decorated the coffee table along with all the books.  In the midst of the clutter, my five year old son and seven year old daughter were alternately playing with and fighting over the new marshmallow shooter that we insanely bought as pre-school graduation gift for the five year old.  So, of course, that meant marshmallows flying all over the room, bouncing off walls and landing everywhere.  They too, would end up largely forgotten, only to be found later sticking to the carpet and somewhat ground in.   Like the clown from that silly old show, I am not sure how all this happened.  Life is just messy, I suppose.  Now, in the show, the clown would announce that it was time for a ten-second-tidy and she would proceed to clean up super fast, mostly by shoving everything under the couch cushions.  That part of the show always bothered me a bit.  I was not sure the message of shoving things haphazardly out of sight as cleaning was the best message for my toddler, but considering the state of my house these days…. I have to admit that really would be an improvement.