"He put the biscuit in the basket!"

Anyone who has stayed at home with a small child (or a large one, I guess...are they really this messy all their lives?) knows how quickly a kid can make a mess. Life at our house isn't quite like the scene in the film The Sixth Sense where the mother walks out of the kitchen for about three seconds and returns to find every single cabinet door open — even the high ones — and her son sitting exactly where she left him at the kitchen table, but when Connor digs into one of his many toy baskets, bags, shelves, cubbies, nooks, or crannies, the view from the rear is like that of a dog burrowing into the dirt: there is stuff flying everywhere and it probably isn't safe to get too close. You could put your eye out — cripes, look what I just wrote. I am a parent.

I've become quite adept at cleaning up the messes that this kid makes (see the last two entries for proof on a much grosser scale). I know exactly where everything goes, and you better believe everything goes where it's supposed to. (For those of you who don't know, I have obsessive compulsive disorder — a topic I'm sure I'll return to later on.) In my previous life, I was a writer for a couple of different publications (ah yes, another topic I'll surely be returning to one day soon), one of them a business monthy. For this paper, I wrote a story on lean manufacturing — the process of trimming as many unnecessary steps from the production cycle as possible. I dare any of these efficiency experts to come into my house and try and find some wasted energy on the job of cleaning up after my whirling dervish of a son.

Growing up, despite being comparatively tall for my age, I flat out stunk at basketball, even though we had a hoop in our driveway during most of my childhood. Now, though, after tossing toys, large and small, across the room into their respective containers, I've developed a weird sense of aim. Maybe it wouldn't translate well on on the blacktop, but as soon as a league starts up using Nerf balls, legos or stuffed dinosaurs, count me in.