Life with Little Boys

It's Saturday afternoon and my house is clean. Floors are swept, vacuumed and mopped. Tables are polished. Tub is scrubbed. Mirrored doors and window panes are muck-free. The laundry is done and put away. As is the most of the general this 'n that—the clutter that builds up around the house during the course of a busy week. There are, however, a few notable exceptions.

One: the fireplace and reading chair in the living room are connected by a pirate bridge made of leftover foam strips from the interlocking mats we picked up for the school library. Two: the bare dining room wall is adorned with the tracing paper pages of a Bakugan story Sam spent the better part of the day creating. These things I will leave be.

My Neat Freak single self couldn't imagine maneuvering a vacuum cleaner gingerly around a 10-foot pirate bridge (which went up three days ago), and she would have thought twice about agreeing to scotch tape anything to the walls. She couldn't understand why mothers would let the house be taken over by toys, why all that stuff couldn't be squared away where it belonged. In fact, she couldn't even imagine slapping a child's artwork on the fridge...and leaving it there. Wasn't that why children had their own bedrooms? No, Neat Freak Angie was happy in clean, tidy spaces that were geared to grown-ups and smelled faintly of vanilla or pear.

As Angie-Mommy, I still very much prefer a clean house, but I don't often have a neat and tidy one. Those "signs of Sammy"—the messy evidence of his play—are part of the landscape of life with a little boy. They make my heart sing with the remembrance of his joys and frustrations as he created them and then showed them off, confident in his right to fully inhabit the house—to re-engineer and redecorate as he pleases. They're wonderful in a way that you can feel only when you are fully, completely in love with a little boy whose imaginary worlds bring energy and colour and quirkiness to your real one.