It was chaos day today. It was “Okay, we’ve had enough with all the clutter and junk and mess” day today.

We’ve been hinting to the Little Pages that their rooms were due for a tidy for about a week now. Surprisingly, none of them leapt to attention, screamed “YES SIR!” and ran off to do it. So today was enforced cleaning day.

It started with the two girls sobbing uncontrollably at the enormity of the task, and then going out to lay in the fetal position in the grass after MrsPages and I decided that if they won’t declutter, we’d do it for them. A large black garbage bag later, the room looks pretty much the same, except all the papers, kleenexes, candy wrappers hidden in drawers (that’s a whole other post) and other actual garbage is gone. The clutter remains, but I now see why the girls were so upset. Hercules didn’t have it so hard in the Augean stables.

Sometimes I wonder what my kids will be like when they grow up. Will they have to shovel out their cubicles to find reports for their bosses? The dugout canoe going up the Amazon to an unreached tribe of headhunters will sink halfway there because Little Page #1 just couldn’t get her backpack under 500 pounds. Sigh. I worry about my children’s future…

The house is in a state of “being decluttered” which means it is in that period of being darkest before the dawn. Decluttering always makes a room look worse before it gets better. MrsPages fought her way clear of the girls’ room and announced that it was a great day for a McDonald’s lunch. The rest of the Little Pages heartily agreed.

I hopped into the PageMobile and sped off, the mighty modern-day hunter out to wrestle a paper bag full of simulated chicken product to the ground to feed his clan. The drive-through was lined up, but I decided to wait because if I order inside, I can’t carry 7 drinks and two large bags of food back out to the car. A few radio tunes later (Led Zeppelin and Pink Floyd, I didn’t mind the wait), I give my order to the cheerful gradeschooler who is working the window. After ringing it all through, she gives me a chipper “…and Have a Nice Dayâ„¢!” but the line of cars in front of me hasn’t moved yet, so there’s an awkward silence. She has absolutely no idea what to do. This isn’t in the manual. She decides to make some light conversation:

“Wow, there’s like, lots of cars here. It’s like, total dreadlock.”

My response can only be shown in text as a “…”. How do you respond to something like that?

I went home feeling much better about my kids’ future. They’re going to do just fine. I wept because I had no shoes…

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