This morning, as I stood in the kitchen making peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, Grant yelled from upstairs, “Mommy! I dropped my toothbrush and the toothpaste got all over the wall!”

“Well, just wipe it off the wall and put it back on your toothbrush,” I said, spreading jam  on bread. It didn’t even occur to me until later in the morning that a few years ago, I’d never have thought that, much less said it.

Do I know which wall had the toothpaste smeared upon it?

No.

Do I care?

Not particularly.

Whenever I do see it, I’ll clean it up. And yes, we do clean the house. But “clean” is a relative term when you’re harboring six-year-old twins and an elderly and often incontinent bichon frisé.

I’m not a bad mom or a careless one, and my kids aren’t hellions. They’re delightful, normal children. I’ve just been a mom for a while now. Six and a half years of spills, smears, messes, and broken stuff (usually lamps). I don’t sweat the small stuff anymore because there’s none of it left.

When the kids are old enough to end a meal with all the food either in their stomachs or on their plates (what’s that, 13 or so?) and our dog shuffles off the mortal coil, I figure we’ll replace the furniture and be able to have people over. And we’ll invest in new lamps so we won’t walk into every other room and be like, “Oh, yeah, this is one of the rooms where the lamps don’t work.”

Until then, I marvel at those of you whose houses aren’t slightly sticky all over and covered with goldfish crumbs, broken crayons, and chalk dust. Where do you keep the kids?

It’s not that I’m not obsessive about things. My kids wear sunscreen almost every day. And I’ve trained them pretty darn well about the whole hand-washing bit. We read. A LOT. But I also hear them fighting upstairs and have gotten to the point where I yell, “Work it out or you’re both headed to time-out!”

Do I know how it works out?

No. But it almost always does.

Mark and I re-watched Shakespeare in Love the other day. Throughout the movie, different, freaked-out characters kept asking “How will it all work out?” and the theater manager says, “It will. I don’t know how, but it will. It’s a mystery.”

For me right now, that kind of sums up parenting. Messy, and a mystery.