We just moved into a new house that is much bigger than our old house. It has a lot more rooms so whereas our old house had a combination visiting-grandparent-room/play-room, we now have a dedicated rec room that should (we naively hope) keep our kids and their chaos contained.
The day after the movers brought our stuff over, my wife and I are busy unpacking box after box while our kids are busy making forts with them (boxes marked ‘fragile’ make the best forts, apparently). We finally get to the box of the kids Arts-n-Crafts stuff and my wife promptly takes it to the new rec room, opens it up, and tells the kids to play in the rec room and not come out.
A couple hours of getting-more-done-than-we-should-and-in-hindsight-should-have-checked-in-sooner, we see our youngest walking around the house with black Play-doh smeared all over his face, arms, and legs as if he gave himself a mud treatment. We follow the trail of black smears down the stairs, to the previously-white door of the rec room and walk inside.
My older two kids are sitting on the floor in a pile of construction paper that has been cut into tiny pieces. All the puzzle pieces from all the puzzles are in one giant pile on the floor. The carpet is covered with ground-in Play-doh. On their table are jars of paints, one of which is spilled on its side and the paint is covering most of the table. My oldest explains that she spilled the paint and she thought she’d let it dry so she could paint some more.
My wife is livid; I’m pretty mad myself. We quietly close the door and go back to unpacking because we don’t want to say/do something we’ll regret and our kids will tell their therapist when their older. At one point, I look up at my wife and offer up this explanation, “Babe, maybe they thought you said, ‘WRECK room’.”