Avert your eyes, neat freaks

We have a holiday tradition.

Every kitty calendar holiday - Thanksgiving, Easter, Flag Day, etc - we pick a project and give it a go.

Since the children reached the age of walking, the project has been find a way to keep the kids from terrorizing the house.

As a result of this apparently lifelong mission, I spend most of my days cleaning. Or as I tell Mike "treading water." Keeping pace with the mess. Head above the stress. Gurgle. Gurgle. Gurrrrggl.....

And the kids are always finding new and interesting ways to usurp my energy.

At first the battles were crib vs. turd (complete with pictures) and urine vs. couch.

Then the battles morphed into something entirely different.

It became house vs. chocolate frosting.

Victoria Secret lotion vs. lotion ninjas.

Toilet vs. roll of toilet paper.

Or rocking chair vs. medicated foot powder.

I almost preferred the poop. (Or maybe not... don't quote me on that one.)

With one major battle trumping all: MOM vs. MESS.

I have been working hard toward regaining my dominance. I put all the girls' toys in small totes and hid them in a locked closet. I organized their clothes closet. I removed anything from their bathroom that could make a mess, save the toilet.

When they want a toy, they ask for it. Yes, I am that mother. When they want to do something else / eat something / play with a different toy, they all clean until every last toy is picked up.

I am also the type of mother who has a timeout or "naughty" chair. Alison has made friends with it many times over the last two days.

New rules. Used and enforced 100%.

I may be mean, but (prepare yourself for disbelief) this is a picture of the girls' room, unretouched, and after they played in it for hours unsupervised as I cleaned! They picked their toys up themselves.

Un-mother-freakin'-believable.

Can you feel my excitement???

Unfortunately, I still had to pick up after them in the livingroom, where they terrorized the stacks of folded towels Mike left out (hey, hon? you know how I tell you it's best to put that stuff away when it's folded and not wait?), played in my beading supplies, pulled the cover off the couch, dumped a wonky pile of hangers on the floor, and emptied my purse throughout the livingroom. This is also an undoctored photo.

I am so used to cleaning up their messes that I can tell who did what without even witnessing the destruction.

Alison: green. Emma: red. Kristin: purple.

I'm a mess expert.

And I know exactly what Alison was searching for in my purse: mints from the Olive Garden she wasn't allowed to have since she didn't eat a single bite of her food. The pile of towels became a trampoline, and the blue tote was a choo-choo train. Choo. Choo.

Now that I've taken away all their toys, they're going to be looking for trouble. Or running hot laps through the house like mad women at a breakneck pace, which is surprisingly not all that fast, especially for our accident-prone Emma. The girl falls when she walks.

I can't wait for these messy days to end.