I finally canceled the maid service I’ve had since I broke my ankle last August. My ankle is sorta better and the cleaners cost a fair bit of money. They did a nice job vacuuming and cleaning the bathrooms, BUT they could not know that my younger son collects stuff. Lots of stuff. As in truckloads of cardboard, wood, screws, metal, branches, tape, glue, boxes, plastic, fabric, stones, etc.

My boys like to make things from this raw material, which is great. Very creative and non-conventional. Except I had a broken ankle and in the ensuing months of healing, I neglected to crawl upstairs to see what had been happening. I figured, hey, how bad can it get in a few months? So what if he couldn’t find his underwear?

So, today I decided to clean the boys’ bathroom (first time since I canceled the cleaners). I made the mistake of glancing into my son’s room on the way to the tub. His stuff went up to the ceiling. If it all had caught fire, we would be dead and my son would have been the first one to go. There was no way to get to the windows to jump out because I couldn’t see the windows. Hell, there was no way to get to the DOOR of his bedroom. He must have been crawling through a tunnel to get to bed at night. Thus, the 12 garbage bags of STUFF.

Never again. I have to go up there at least once a week and make him throw stuff out. It was that bad.