Yesterday the house was clean. Relatively clean. Like clean by our standards. Tidy-ish. From the front door to the living room, toy-free, dirty-laundry-free, peanut-free. Clean.

By noon today, you would think Santa’s elves had spent hours rifling through toys taking inventory of what we already have, what we need (absolutely NOTHING), leaving a trail of books, toys, arts & crafts, dress up clothes everywhere.

When I look in the direction of my family room, I can see paint supplies covering the kitchen table and some on the pads of the chairs, a paint smock draped over a bar stool smeared with a rainbow of wet, Dollarama acrylics.

The family room is a rainbow loom stew of bands, partially finished bracelets, completed masterpieces, puzzle pieces, a rogue, sheer wedding dress slip if you were a size 5T when you got married with matching plastic “glass slippers.” There’s an orange peel on the ottoman re-shaped to fool someone into thinking it was an orange in its entirety if your thing was to eat random pieces of fruit you found on top of furniture.

There are UNO cards, the glint of scotch tape on the carpet that didn’t get collected during the post-gift-wrap clean-up. Wait, those are candy cane wrappers Chloe stole from the tree and left only a note with the letters “C L O” was here (she’s getting there).

And then this happened.

Welcome to the family Jillian Jiggs, Snow woman.

I didn’t have the heart to tell the kids she looks a lot like a snowy owl.