category F5?

you know what i'm talking about!  if you have little ones underfoot, you know that where there are children, there is mess!  and as much as i love to see my kids busy and happily playing, i know that at the end of that playtime, they'll ever so effortlessly scurry to another zone in the house to make yet another mess.  and guess who gets to do the bulk of tidying around this homestead?

you guessed it!!

now, i will admit, i can get the older ones to clean up when need be.  and yes, i do relinquish control once in a while and let them do the whole cleaning job (even though my 6 and 4 year old don't do it up to 'mommy' standards) but that little one.  hooo boy!  she is a little tornado!  wherever she goes, the mess follows!  but dangit... she is so cute, how can you get mad, right?  case in point...

she is just so cute i want to EAT her!!!  (don't call CFS, i'm not really going to ingest her... maybe just take a few little edible bites!)
ok, look out!  sound the alarms... here she goes...

she is keeping herself busy.  that is good.  but eventually that playtime turns into this:

 then she meanders her way throughout the house and drops things like this:

 then she reaches my bathroom and does things like this:

tell me... what baby can resist all the goodies on the fridge?

(yes, i know it's my own fault for putting things so low down but i can't afford a bigger fridge just to hold all the artwork, charts, pictures and calendars!)
then i have to make MY way around the house, putting things back in their place so that they now look semi-presentable like this:

ahhhh... my mind already feels cleaner and more spacious when the mess is cleaned up!  :)

ok, so yes, the baby is a little tornado, wreaking havoc (errrr... creating mass destruction) wherever she goes.  but i'm lucky, b/c the mess isn't limited to just her... oh no!  here's another very common sight to behold:

"can you play with me, mommy?"
how do they do it?  i'm not sure.  but by the end of the day, it looks like this:

don't kid yourself, it's not the kids that tidy it up... it's their anal mother.  ha ha ha!  but this is just one of those posts where i'm keeping it real.  some days i feel i'm married to this guy (down below), instead of the big M:

(disclaimer: i'm really not a neat freak at all... but probably more of a controlled organized freak and once i've cleaned something up, only to have it all messed up again, is when it gets to be too much that it's comical.  hey, i'm working on it!  kids will be kids... they say you only realize all these things when you're a grandparent.  can i quite possibly learn these things ahead of schedule?  only time will tell!)