It's Eight O'Clock in the Morning ...

And I'm in the mood to write something funny and cheerful, though I have absolutely no idea of what to write about. I will spend my morning cleaning Will's room to bring it up to Health Codes before my mother-in-law's arrival on Wednesday. My big plan--Martha Stewart, take note--is to throw piles and piles of things in a box and shove the box in the attic until after Christmas.

Will's room is a collection of tee-tiny pieces scattered hither and yon. Lately, he's been getting sent to his room quite a bit (the last month or so his automatic response to any sort of instruction has been "No!", which is tiresome, as is being called "Stupid Head" at least three times a day during the Christmas season), and during his protracted stays, he gets out all his little pieces of things and examines them, makes up secret lives for them, and then throws them under his bed or in his closet with all the other little pieces, which, when they get a little time alone together, seem to breed as steadily as rabbits.

Put simply, Will has too much stuff. He's the younger brother, so he gets all the stuff that once belonged to Jack, and then he gets new stuff every Christmas and birthday. This stuff adds up to a ridiculous amount of toys, puzzles, games, guys, Legos, Lincoln Logs, crayons, books, trucks and so on. I do occasional purges, to no avail.

And I haven't even talked about the food and drink he secrets away in his room while no one's looking. And the hermit crab carcasses and the two cups of kidney beans scattered all over the place--where did they come from? (Well, I know where the hermit crab carcasses come from--they come from dead hermit crabs, several of whom, while alive, Will so thoughtfully released into the wild. We are done--done, I tell you--with hermit crabs in this family, no matter how much the boys beg the next time we go to the beach).

You can imagine that writing all this down is increasing my enthusiasm for tackling the project. But it will be so satisfying when I finish. And it will last all of five minutes, but it will be a lovely five minutes. Maybe I'll drink a cup of tea in there and read poetry and not think one single thought about the futility of cleaning a five-year-old's room a week before Christmas, when two million more little pieces will roll in, and I will be done for.