It's been awfully busy around here with two kids who have colds and a husband on the mend.  I've never felt more divided and pulled and in demand, even more than I remember feeling with a newborn in the house.  The other day I was in the basement operating as Chief Shower Assistant to Marty when I realized that the kids were no longer in the bathroom.  I told Marty to be careful, not to slip and fall or make any sudden movements, and ran upstairs to locate the kids.  I found them in the kitchen, talking on the speaker phone to their Uncle Mike - Martin naked, Sophie in a Halloween costume.  I hung up the phone, told Martin to get dressed and ran back downstairs to check on Marty.  Still not hearing anything from upstairs, I ran back up to find Sophie playing nicely with her babies still dressed in costume, Martin in the bathtub washing himself out of a bucket because I told him he could not turn on the bathtub faucet.  IT. IS. CHAOS.

With this kind of environment, it's safe to say that the house is in a perpetual state of Mess.  I'm trying to keep up with the laundry, keeping things barely on the clean side of the scale, and letting go of pretty much everything else.  Even knowing that, it was still a flat out shock to me when I was faced with this vision when I went into the basement to find a simple ruler.


Because that is just ridiculous.  All the toys.  The crazy mess.  But the funniest part to me was knowing that almost four years ago I took another picture of a room that I thought was a super huge mess with massive amounts of toys.


Oh my gosh, I just had no idea how much worse it would get.  That old mess is NOTHING.

P.S. I found the ruler in the first scan around the room, which maybe means that the basement isn't really messy, just "creatively organized."

P.P.S. I'm definitely going to have to get that basement cleaned up before Marty becomes really mobile and ventures back there looking for something.  If he sees it, I'm going to be caring for a guy recovering from a hip operation AND open heart surgery.