Call it Spring Fever or a celebration that March is finally over or that I know my kids are going to be home for the next four days and I just can’t stand the mess anymore, but today I drank my tea and then got after it on picking up/decluttering around the house (spoiler alert: it looks better but is far from done). As you might imagine, we do this quite often but with seven mess makers living here, it takes all of two seconds for it to become a disaster zone again, especially with this girl on the premises.

Don’t let the cuteness fool you. She is the No. 1 Offender when it comes to spreading randomness from one end of my house to the other at lightning speed. Here’s an example of said random toys that were all together in the same 2 ft. area of a room that is NOT a toy room, and it doesn’t include any books or Lego, which is misleading because those feature in every pile everywhere all the live long day.

It’s been like this for a couple months now (my mom will back me up because WA does the exact same thing at her house) and I have been trying to figure out why that is. Is this just her personality? I mean, it could be because she can’t seem to dry her hands in the bathroom without pulling the towel to the floor, but I guess time will tell for sure. But what I think is (also) happening here is that she’s our first 3yo to be on the literal loose in the house without a little sibling behind her and that has changed the game for sure.

In the past we always kept toys with lots of pieces and any sort of small part away from the youngest Welschie by keeping them all in the basement (or at least did our very best to do so). Only baby toys and things that couldn’t be swallowed by a crawling/exploring 6-24 month-old were allowed on the main floor up until Wilson graduated from that stage, and oh my, is she having a blast with this arrangement. In fact, she throws her fun around like plastic confetti on a regular basis and holy moly cow, I can’t keep up, not even if I switched back from tea to coffee.

Eventually the goal/plan is to sort all the kid chaos in our house and get rid of a bunch of it. The last year of pandemic living has left me wanting to do that task very badly and also having zero energy left to actually tackle the enormous job of it. So maybe this summer? Until then I’ll just be chasing Hurricane Wilson from one room to the next, giving thanks for her imaginative play ability while also (mostly silently) cursing the mess it creates.