I now understand.....

......why some animal mothers eat their young.

I knew going in that the project known as Joshua's room would be daunting at best. But I didn't expect what I actually encountered......a disaster of epic proportions.

I am truly the epitome of.....If I don't actually see it, it must not exist. Of course, this doesn't apply to my faith or my relationship with Jesus. With my kids and their rooms......absolutely, it does. I walked in to Josh's room and began tackling the 2 plastic bins against the wall. One was supposed to be full of nothing but Duplo legos. The other, with random toys and stuffed animals and probably a sock or two. What I got instead was legos, plastic letters and numbers, 3 belts, 5 socks, one zip-off leg to a pair of pants, a quarter, a dime, a pack of Blue Ice, 23 stuffed animals of all shapes and sizes, a pair of shoes, 7 books, 4 unsharpened pencils, 3 brand new crayons, 2 empty Coke cans, a Butterfinger wrapper, a pen, a marker, a SpiderMan mask, a bicycle helmet and a table knife. It was truly the PV"s version of Shock and Awe.

The only thing missing was the partridge in the pear tree.

By the time Julia and I were finished, we had all the duplos in one bucket, the stuffed animals in the middle of the bedroom floor, the books on the book shelves in Daniel's room, the clothes in the hamper and just about everything else in the trash can. I started to sift through the bigger of the two buckets to see if anything was salvagable, but when I realized there were crumbs of some sort coating the bottom, I decided it wasn't worth the time. I did keep the Thomas the Tank Engine stuff as well as any Hot Wheels cars, but everything else was deemed trash-worthy.

Good thing tomorrow is trash day.