by Rachel Toalson | Messy Mondays
Do you have this one place in your bedroom where you once put a stack of something you didn’t know what to do with (papers that should probably be filed away, but it’s just so much effort) and told yourself you’d clean it up another day and now it’s been two years?
Yeah. Me neither.
No, that’s not my second-grade son’s kindergarten report card under my wing chair. No, that’s absolutely not an old water bill we forgot to pay. No that’s not a library book we’ve had missing for years.
Just pretend you didn’t see this dirty little secret.
After all, that’s what we do.
by Rachel Toalson | Messy Mondays
“I can’t find any socks that match,” he said. “I also can’t find my agenda or my folder.”
Well, is it any wonder?
Just look at his room. What in the world happened here? you may ask. It’s what we asked, too.
There is no simple explanation. There is just “an 8-year-old happened here.”
Here’s the thing. We don’t keep toys in our boys’ rooms (it’s just easier that way–they don’t play with them when they’re supposed to be sleeping). But we do keep books. And the 8-year-0ld recently got to move his art supplies into his room, because he wants to be a cinematographer who makes cartoons, and, well, we wanted to encourage that.
Until.this.room.
His daddy went upstairs to look for a pair of socks before school this morning and found 16 singles. I think all the socks lost in the dryer’s black hole have found a portal to this room. Other things using the portal: all the old balloons from St. Patrick’s Day that should be completely deflated by now, every single colored pencil in the neighborhood and 10 billion pieces of paper.
This weekend his daddy and I will be helping him clean his room, and he’ll be paying us for our time.
Money is the way you teach an 8-year-old to keep his room clean.
by Rachel Toalson | Messy Mondays
Spring Break happened to my house.
Here’s where our house stands after four hours of cleaning. So if you’re looking at the picture, thinking, “That’s really not that bad,” trust me. It was WAY worse.
Also, since we’re on the subject of messy, here’s something I posted during Day 2 of Spring Break:
“I’m about to start drinking from the wine bottle. Because kids.”
Because kids.
I just want to say, thank God for teachers.
by Rachel Toalson | Messy Mondays
I spy…
A pair of black pants
An unpacked suitcase
A letter to Mama
A little dog’s face.
I just want to say, for the record, that this isn’t my fault.
You see, there was this time we had some friends coming over for dinner, and we were drowning in art that the kids were producing in record numbers, because it was summertime and school was out and we don’t watch TV. We had these empty baskets, and my husband thought putting all the papers in the baskets and hiding them in our closet would qualify as cleaning. And then those baskets sort of exploded. All over our closet. While we weren’t looking. Because boys, of course, wanted to know where all their artwork went. And where the writing binders were put. And where those 10 billion paper airplanes ended up.
So, after all their digging, after dinner with our friends, after we put boys to bed and came back into our room and saw this abominable mess, we deflated. We gave up. We surrendered to the law of entropy. We couldn’t walk into our closet, so we just stopped hanging up our clothes and, instead, hung them over all the junk on the floor. We couldn’t reach our shoe storage, so we just left our shoes where we took them off. I could no longer put drawers away when I went digging for sewing scraps, so I just piled them on my sewing table.
Every now and then, boys still come looking for last summer’s artwork, just to keep the mess fresh. So we don’t forget it’s there, I guess. As if we could.
There are probably some science projects growing in here by now.
That reminds me–anybody seen my son’s running shorts?
by Rachel Toalson | Messy Mondays
This isn’t your typical Messy Monday post. This isn’t that mess under the bed or the one in his room or the nasty waiting to be emptied from the trash can.
This is the kind that can wreck a heart into a mess.
You see, there is a boy in our home who is 5 years old. He tried to draw his older brother, who is 8, a picture of Darth Vader, because his older brother is in love with Star Wars right now. Apparently it didn’t quite look like Darth Vader, or at least in the 5-year-old’s eyes. So he got really upset, because he really wanted to draw his oldest brother something special.
So our oldest boy wrote him the sweetest note an older brother can write to a younger.
I might not have even see this, except that my boys are really bad at putting things away. This time I’m glad. So beautiful. So messy. So wonderful to see the bond between a boy and his brother.
Heart effectively wrecked.
(They were fist-fighting about 20 minutes later, so sweet doesn’t last. You just take it while you can.)
by Rachel Toalson | Messy Mondays
This basket is designated for school papers. It takes less than a week to fill it. So many papers. Why are there so many school papers? Fliers about camps our kids probably won’t attend, sign-it sheets that get lost in the shuffle and make me send an apology note to my boys’ teachers every other day, birthday party invitations we don’t ever attend (because we’re terrible, anti-social parents), worksheets I really don’t care about want to see, because everything my boys do is amazing.
Can I opt out? Is there some “please e-mail me” list I missed out on? If there is and I am needlessly spending my mornings after a slept-three-hours night sorting the papers out of my boys’ school folders, I quit. Forever.
