So I came home the other day only to find that the train table was teetering with trains and tracks (and some cars and action figures), the floor was littered with LEGOS, T’s bedroom was packed in with play food and kitchen stuff, his bed was piled-high in “boat” formation (see https://realmomtime.wordpress.com/2011/08/12/such-wild-imaginations/ as to what that means), and the living room sofa was bogged down with books.

My god… seriously?! What a big, hot mess.

No, no, C informed me, it wasn’t a mess, not at all. It was just that T was in a “creative mode.”

When I walked into this disaster zone, I guess my face must have done something to prompt C to come up with this latest phrase for “a big, hot mess” because I’d never heard that one before. Honestly, it stopped me dead in my tracks and all I could do was laugh. A creative mode, eh? Hmm… but then, I actually stopped to think about it for a second and you know what? As much as that big, hot mess – sorry, creative mode – was driving me batty at first sight, as I navigated my way carefully around everything so as not to topple anything or injure myself, well, I had to admit that C was kind of not as wrong as he could have been (yes, that’s my sad was to admit he was… OH I can’t even bring myself to say it, ugh, but you know must know what I mean).

But really, think about it, RMT’ers. To a preschooler, is anything ever really a big, hot mess? In disarray? Chaotic? My guess is probably not because otherwise why on earth would these children leave piles of nonsense wherever they manage to exist on a minute-by-minute basis. I now truly believe that the down-and-dirty of it is that these messes are their little creations and masterpieces not to be swept up or under the rug (literally) by us big people, even if the mere sight of all this flourishing creativity at times wants to make the OCD neat-freak in me scamper about and pick it all up and put it away at once.

Bottom line is I just need to cut that constant cleaning up crap out. As Phyllis Diller once said, “Cleaning your house while your kids are still growing is like shoveling the walk before it stops snowing.” I need to embrace this more than I have been and just let it keep on snowing all day long. Perhaps a good compromise would be that we can all pitch in and shovel the walk once a night before bed; we’d all sleep better knowing the road’s clear for the morning that way, too. After all, I can confidently predict a full-on T blizzard again tomorrow and a day full of sunny creativity.