“Mom, our house is messy.” That’s what my 2 ½ year old told me this week. I surveyed the room and saw he was right, there’s a battlefield of trains, cars, tractors, buses and firemen blanketing the living room floor. Half of the dining room table looks like I’m potty training a puppy and all of the shoes we’ve worn this week are well-positioned to recreate the Great Wall of China just inside our entryway.

Such is life, as some say.

But wait, this wasn’t supposed to be my life! I swear I used to be a clean person, I really was, but that was B.C. (before child.)

Now I must say before my hubby hops on here trying to out me, I’ve always had an issue with clutter in that I keep paper items. Magazines I am “finishing up,” coupons that I intend to (but never do) use and random pieces of mail. I cull through these little piles of papers and toss them, but they re-emerge. They’re not like the leaning tower of Pisa or anything, honestly they couldn’t fill one shoebox, but still.

I wonder if my place will ever be clean for more than 12 hours. I’ve tried picking up a little bit each day, but that doesn’t last long. After getting up at 5 a.m., leaving the house every day at 6:20 a.m. and returning at 6:30 p.m. only to make a Herculean effort to feed and get my kid to bed by 7:30 p.m. I run out of energy to then clean something. Afterall, there’s still dinner to be prepped and ate, at some point I need to have a conversation with my husband and also likely need to log in to my job to handle a few things.

I’m thinking that as my son gets older, he’ll be able to chip in more with chores. Right now he picks up his toys (um, somewhat) and likes the handheld vacuum, which is a start. Until then I guess the next time he tells me the house is messy I should just smile and say: “I know sweetie, deal with it.”