Photo A Day, Days 26 & 27: "Enjoy the Little Things" and "Under My Feet"

I suppose this could be considered cheating, combining two days into one. And even though I was a couple of days behind, I honestly intended to write two separate entries for this weekend. But when I found my subject for “Enjoy the Little Things” and realized it was also perfectly appropriate for “Under My Feet,” I couldn’t help combining them. And when you see my photograph, you’ll understand why.

Tiny toys are the bane of every parent of small children. As much as kids love big play kitchens and oversized stuffed animals and giant toy fire trucks, it seems like they spend even more time playing with the tiny cheapo toys that came from McDonald’s or in a 30-pack from the Dollar Store or the local party store. (Or the tiny not-so-cheapo toys that came from the Lego store.) And these tiny toys have two major problems: 1) they are so small that they are constantly getting lost (between couch cushions, at the bottom of Mom’s purse, under the seat of the car, in the pocket of a seldom-worn jacket), and 2) they are constantly – and painfully – underfoot.

The most obvious case of tiny, underfoot, hated-by-parents toys are Lego blocks. Not the big Duplos that you can convince your kids are Legos until they’re about 3 years old, which are much softer underfoot and come in bright colors that can be seen from the moon, but the genuine article, the miniscule, same-color-as-the-carpet, only-one-way-to-make-a-spaceship-from-this-set, 3,000-pieces-per-package, sharper-than-a-serpent’s-tooth, Daddy-will-you-put-this-together-for-me stuff of parental nightmares. The one minor advantage to Lego blocks, of course, is that since you have 500,000 of them around your house, any one piece that gets broken or “accidentally” thrown away will not be missed by your child. (It may suddenly be missed by you when you are attempting to construct that scale model of the Millennium Falcon that your kids have been begging you to build for weeks, however.)

But with pretty much any other tiny toy, your child will know – and weep – when one is missing. At the moment, my daughter’s favorite tiny toy is a pair of plastic pteranodons that Santa bought by the dozen at the party store and tucked into her stocking on a whim. Now, we can’t leave the house without mother and baby pteranodon in tow. Conveniently, they’re small enough to fit both of them in a pocket or purse, and they’re soft plastic so repeatedly dropping them on the floor in church or, say, a dance recital (not that that has actually happened, of course, but hypothetically) is not disruptive to others nearby. But because there are so many places they can be tucked, there are also so many places they need to be looked for every time they disappear. I now plan on leaving the house 15 minutes earlier than usual no matter where we’re going so we can stage a massive dinosaur hunt before getting in the car.

But I’m glad that my kids do know how to enjoy the little things. Even if those little things do tend to end up under my feet.

My Kids Make Me a Better Housekeeper

Confession time: I am a slob. An unrepentant (mostly), inveterate, habitual slob. I'm not dirty, but I am messy. I like having my clothes in piles instead of in drawers or on hangers. I need my shoes out where I can see them, not tucked into cubbies or dangling from a shoe tree. I see no reason to keep my toothbrush anywhere other than right on the sink where I can grab it with soap in my eyes and my glasses off. And towels dry just as quickly when thrown haphazardly over the curtain rod as they do when folded neatly on a towel rack. I'm a slob, and I don't care who knows it.

When I got married to a neat and tidy husband, I learned to curb my messy tendencies. Somewhat. OK, a little bit. Okay, okay, a TEEENY TINY bit. I have a shoe tree that most of my shoes are on. Some of my clothes land in the closet even though others still live on the couch. I hang the towels neatly on the towel rod in my husband's bathroom all the time and even in my own bathroom when we have company.

But what really made me rein in my inner slob was having kids. Most parents get a little germaphobic when their first child is born, but I'm not talking cleanliness, just messiness. When you have a baby, the amount of stuff in your house expands exponentially. The crib, the car seats, the swing, the diaper pail, the high chair, the piles of diapers and wipes and medicines, the socks and the onesies and the cute little hats, the blankets and the stuffed animals and the rattles and the light-up toys, the binkies and the bottles...it just never ends. You learn to be neat so your house doesn't implode from its own weight. But let's be honest: you also learn to be neat so you're never hunting for a binkie at 3am with an infant screeching in your ear. You learn to be neat so you know if you're about to dirty the last clean bottle and you need to run the dishwasher NOW before you're faced with a hungry child and a stack of unwashed bottles. You learn to be neat so an unexpected poopsplosion doesn't suddenly reveal that you're out of diapers/baby wipes/onesies.

And once your children become mobile, the need for neatness is even greater. Any item left on the floor will promptly be popped into a curious mouth, whether it be a stale Cheerio, a petrified raisin, a dead bug, a penny, or a small Lego piece. And speaking of small Lego pieces, the mobile child is not the only one whose tender toes are in imminent danger of being impaled by small toys left on the floor. What parent among us has not endured the agony of stepping on a Lego or a Barbie shoe or an abandoned Monopoly figurine with a bare foot in the middle of the night?

Being neat is a survival tactic.

Yes, motherhood has curbed some of my worst messy tendencies. But it more than makes up for it by allowing me to enjoy other types of messy fun: hands covered in sidewalk chalk dust, gluey pieces of macaroni sliding slimily across a piece of construction paper, licking the frosting off a chocolate cupcake, fingers squelching though mud in search of earthworms, cutting tissue paper into confetti, jumping in puddles. Motherhood is a wonderful balance between neat and messy!