Housekeeping

You can either have kids or a perfect house. You can't have both. Even if it's a gingerbread house. Try making a gingerbread house with 5 kids and see if it turns out neat and tidy, with all the beautiful candies lined up in rows with perfect icicles hanging from the eaves. If it turns out like the picture on the box, you're not letting the kids help. Or your kids are idiot savants whose specialty is icing. Like Rain Man, but with gingerbread. My kids aren't prodigies with the frosting, but it's fun to see their personalities come out. They each did a side. Golda laid hers out first and made it colorful and symmetrical. Ruby did the roof with a neat red and green pattern of rows. Ari did a wall with solid red chocolate chips to replicate bricks. Freestone used ALL the candy and stacked it several layers deep. He worked at it long after everyone else had finished.

I think the gingerbread house did turn out perfect. Just like the piles of boots and backpacks by the front door are perfect, and the never-ending crumb fest under the kitchen counter, and the blankety doll beds I find everywhere, and the stacks and stacks of artwork and letters and ideas for plays and tiny notes. It's all perfect. At some point during every day, I clear it all away, but it comes back. I have a note from Freestone in front of me that says, "Circe from Freestone." He wrote it all by himself. That's the kind of perfection that looks like a mess unless you really take a good look. Just like the gingerbread house!