I work from home in my "basement office" as I like to call it, and sometimes it gets a little lonely around here while the boys are at school. For some reason, I feel it a little more after our cleaning lady comes. After she leaves, I often find myself going upstairs and sitting in their suddenly pristine rooms, looking around and absorbing the quiet and the enjoyable neatness. But soon that subsides and I begin to miss the chaos, the seemingly random clutter of childhood mess, that perhaps is very thought out. And I'll get up and begin to look for little clues that my little ones are still in there somewhere. I always discover something, a book, a fake gold pirate coin, some dice will be laying around that I know they played with that morning. And then I feel better knowing that soon they will be home again banging around, I'll ask them 10 times to clean up their rooms, and I'll beg for them to keep their voices down.
