The Messy Moments Make the Best Stories

Five minutes before we need to go out the door, my toddler walks into my arms with a huge grin on her face and magenta nail polish everywhere. It’s on her shirt, arms, legs, face, fingers…you name it, she’s got it.

In the scramble to scrub her skin (a hopeless cause) and change her shirt (for the second time in half an hour), I neglect to check the bedroom from whence she came. Only later do I find the polish painted onto and fully absorbed into the fibers of her bedroom carpet. It was tan. Now it’s tan with pink polka dots of various sizes and shapes. More like a leopard print, but pink.

While I’m still scrubbing her skin, peeling off the softened strip near her elbow, I can’t help but remember that it wasn’t really all that long ago that one of her older brothers was two and he decided to empty the contents of my eldest son’s backpack on the floor. This child who will remain nameless dumped all the contents of the backpack, including those previously inside of a brand new bottle of Elmer’s glue, on the floor.

On a different day, the same son emptied a tube of toothpaste in the bathroom sink. He drew with a black Sharpie marker on the living room couch. He squeezed maple syrup on the dining room floor. He dumped a full box of Cheerios. He deciphered all the child-proof locks in the kitchen, and he did at least one more thing which I can’t write about on a blog.

Maybe this kind of behavior and these messes at least partly explain why we don’t bother to buy brand new furniture and why hand-me-downs are my favorite kid clothes!

But truly, by the fifth child, I don’t even see the fingerprints on the walls and the smudges on the window panes anymore. This is our family, our home and our life together.

I’ve learned that after damages are assessed, clean up commenced and completed, and I accept the marks made that can’t be erased or washed out or covered up, the messy moments make the best stories.

These are the stories that my kids want to hear on repeat. Because they’ve been told over and over again, these are the ones we remember, share and laugh about. These are our moments. The messy ones.

For more information about Katie's book, Loving My Children, click here.