Where did all this stuff come from?

Leaving the house every morning, I always have two thoughts: I wish I could stay, and I wonder what this place will look like when I get home tonight. My children are like most children -- they have a lot of stuff, and they leave it everywhere.

My husband and I spend countless hours picking up, tripping over, putting away and looking for kid stuff. Because cleaning up and organizing has become our life's work, we take it very seriously, like we would a job. We strategize, we delegate, we review our progress, we evaluate our staff's (I mean our kids') performance. But in the end, we always receive the same rating -- Needs Improvement.

A few of our problem areas:

• The end of our kitchen table is a staging area for all entries and exits, as it's the first surface encountered when anyone enters our house. It's always littered with homework, mail, sometimes shoes. I draw the line at socks though. I've pitched enough fits about socks on the kitchen table that no one dares park their socks there.
• We all love throws. Every time any of the five of us sits down to watch TV, read, or whatever, it's with a throw. The problem is, only two of us know how to properly fold a throw and return it to the cupboard. The rest of us either roll it into a ball and try to wedge that ball into the cupboard, or sometimes just leave it on the floor.

We do have a few things that seem to work for us:

• Once or twice a year, we purge. Sometimes with the kids, but mostly without. My kids don't even ask me now which of their things I've donated to charity, as they know my response is always "tell me what you're missing, and I'll tell you if I donated it."
• We've designated territories where the kids are allowed to be as messy as they want to, and those territories are rarely invaded by the parents. Unless one of us wants to have a heart attack. I'm still scratching my head from a foray into my daughter Andie's closet a few months ago. What does a 12 year old need 6 tiny bottles of ketchup for?

After many years of practice (12 years since our first was born, and the spontaneous generation of stuff began), we still don't have it quite figured out. We know, though, that it's better to laugh than to yell. It will be a blink of an eye before all three kids are grown up, and trying to organize their own houses.

Too bad I won't have any helpful advice for them.

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