Love + eMotion: No Guests at Our House, Please

You wake up at 7am to make coffee for your husband and dress your oldest for Kindergarten. You get them out the door, then settle down to get some work done. Usually, you only have time to check your email before your toddler wanders into your lap. He says, “I’m hungry Mommee.”

In the kitchen, he doesn’t like any of the options you present. He tosses his milk across the room splattering smelly stains across the dining room rug. He smears applesauce on his placemat and paints it on his hair. While you’re cooking him breakfast, he knocks over the Nestle Quik Strawberry Powder. He cries for Sesame Street. He says, “I’m mad.”

An hour later, his tummy full, his body bathed, you settle him on the couch with his favorite stuffed animal. You try to meet a deadline, but he keeps crying for you to play with him. He drags his toys into your room and lines them up beside your laptop. He climbs up onto your chair and starts to doodle on your papers. Before you know it, he’s dropping paperclips down your shirt.

Fine, you promise to play with him. He’s holding your pinky and walking you up the stairs to his train table. You trip on DVDs that he’s ripped out of cases, navigate through a maze of riding toys that you now regret purchasing. The family room that you and your husband tidied last night is littered with all the now unfolded clothes that you hadn’t had time to put away, Annie’s Organic Bunny Fruit Snack wrappers, half-eaten GoGurts and all the toys that the kids are supposed to put away into two specially designated storage bins before their bedtime.

You don’t know when he had time to make such a mess. And boy, are you mad that your daughter taught him how to help himself to snacks out of the fridge and pantry.

By the time, you are upstairs, you’ve got bigger problems.

This past week, you had tried some tips from Why Kids Should Clean and What They Can Do and Lessons in Cleaning House. You gave each kid a responsibility chart and taught them how to do some simple chores like put the silverware away, set the table and tidy their room. The kids thought chores were fun and each day they competed with each other to see who could clean their room faster. And then you agreed to host a party tomorrow so that a rigid deadline might get the house in order.

But somehow, maybe in the middle of the night, the kids undid all of your hard work and actually quadrupled the mess. All those books that you patiently showed your toddler how to place on his shelf are now strewn across both their rooms, the bathroom and down the stairs. The Legos that he had helped you sort into bins based upon size and color had been dumped in their beds. They had also broken into your scrapbook room and tore up your expensive paper. Stampin Up! Markers were uncapped and bleeding onto the carpet.

Messy House, Messy Minds has you worried about a research study that stated, "household order taps a more fundamental characteristic of parents or households, such as maternal industriousness, planning ability, or conscientiousness, that gives rise to both orderliness and better reading skills in children." Meanwhile, your husband seems to complain all the time that he can’t think because the house is such a mess. The two of you simply can’t keep up with your kids’ combustive superpowers of mayhem and mess.

Just when you are about to give up because there is no way you can sleep tonight from the mountains of cleaning to be done and work commitments due. Just when you remember why you never invite guests or throw parties since your toddler started to walk; you climb into your daughter’s bed and pull the covers over your head and discover a scrap of your expensive paper, where she had written “I love you Mommy” over and over.

Have you discovered the kryptonite for your kid’s super ability to create mayhem and mess?