Everything I own is covered in glitter.

No matter how much I vacuum. No matter how much I dust, sweep and mop.

GLITTER. Freaking everywhere.

This might make you question where I live….Is it a night club? Some kind of Christmas twilight zone? A preschool classroom gone wrong? A land of never-ending fairy tales?

Yes. Yes. Yes. And YES. I live in some kind of curious amalgam of these places.

I live with two little girls. They are 5 and 3 years old. If you also live with little girls, please nod your head in understanding as you give me a pat on the back through your computer. I know you get it. For those of you that don’t have this particular honor, I will elaborate.

These little girls are constantly changing their outfits and playing dress up. Their dress up clothes are covered in glitter and rhinestones. The gaudier the better! They wear these princess outfits all over my house. They sit on the furniture to drink tea and hold court. They dance and twirl down the hallways. They whip through this place in a tornado of shimmering tutus, royal jewels and giggles. So my furniture is permanently covered in glitter. In fact, the glitter has worked its way into the fibers of all the upholstery. It doesn’t even vacuum up anymore. All I need to do is dim the lights and the couch looks like a booth in a low-class nightclub.

The Christmas decorations came out this weekend. I love Christmas, and I love that my girls love Christmas. The more Christmas stuff, the better! Except that I spent time working the decorations strategically into my home’s decor, and my daughters have zero regard for visual balance in a room. My careful consideration of where to place my Christmas things is fruitless. Every Christmas decoration looks like a toy to them. Their tiny fingers just can’t resist picking things up to look at them and move them around. Some of the Christmas things are sparkly. Some of the sparkles fall off because they are not meant to be played with by little hands. These sparkles and glitter sprinkle the floors, shelves and end tables that these items were placed on. Curious little girls have no concept of when their mom last dusted those exact surfaces. (AHEM….Yesterday.) So I basically am living in a never-ending sparkle dust nightmare, and it would take a Christmas miracle to wake me up.

I love crafts and art projects, and I love doing them with my kids. I actually talked Cody into converting a large closet into an art space for the kids. We do crafts and art projects daily. Clearly, art with these fairy princesses means:

“It’s not finished unless it sparkles.”

We have a plethora of gems, rhinestones, sparkle paint, sparkle glue, sparkle beads and – you guessed it – glitter. In every shade of the rainbow. No matter how much I supervise and try to control the art chaos, I end up sweeping up a glitter shitstorm every afternoon. What is it about glitter that just makes it migrate everywhere?! As I sweep the floors, my eyes catch tiny glints in the grooves of the wood. Just taunting me. Asking why I don’t care enough to get down on my hands and knees to obliterate every last flake of glitter from my floors once and for all? The answer is simple: Because it will be back tomorrow….And the next day…And the day after that. For every flake of glitter I clean up, two more will allude me until the sun reaches the right angle in the sky. Then I will see another glint….And another….And then even more glints come evening once the lights get turned on. Just thinking about it is enough to make me go bat-shit crazy! So I’ll just continue to sweep what I can, and pretend like I did a good job. For my sanity. Screw those out-of-reach flakes in the floor grooves! They add character to the house.

The imaginations of a preschooler and toddler know no bounds. I love that they play pretend. I love that they really believe pixie dust will make them fly. I even love the fact that glitter looks a lot like pixie dust. Our glitter stash from the aforementioned daily craft party is kept on the high shelf in their art space. Turns out, Avery can reach this shelf with the help of a chair to stand on. I know this for a fact. Because today I came around the corner and found the girls chanting,

“Faith, trust and PIXIE DUST!”

Avery began tossing handfuls of glitter on Emmy’s head. She then instructed her little sister,

“Keep your eyes closed and think your happy thoughts, Em! After you start to fly you have to give me some pixie dust so I can fly too, OK?”

Poor Emmy. She really thought she was going to fly. Her face was pinched up with the effort of thinking all those happy thoughts, and her chubby little 3-year-old arms were flapping like she was about to take off. Flecks of glitter were falling over her cheeks and working their way into her clothes. There was an actual PILE of glitter on the top of that kid’s head.

I immediately flared with pure, red anger. How dare those little stinkers drag a chair over to the high art shelf and take down some of its forbidden contents! What on earth went through their heads when they thought that tossing HANDFULS of glitter over the freshly vacuumed carpet would ever be acceptable? And more importantly…..WHO THE HELL DID THEY THINK WAS GOING TO CLEAN THIS MESS UP?!

Then the anger faded and I just smiled. Because I remember what it was like to be an imaginative little girl. I remember what it was like to get so wrapped up in your playtime fairy tale story, that you forget about the everyday rules. I remember trying to explain to adults that I didn’t mean to make a mess, it just happened. In Neverland pixie dust makes you fly, and definitely doesn’t need to be cleaned up. These two little girls were in Neverland, not my living room. They were sprinkling pixie dust, not glitter. And they were going to fly! How exciting is that?

In my moment of reflection, Avery looked up at me and said, “MOM! We found Tinkerbell’s pixie dust! We are going to figure out how to use it to fly! Do you want to fly with us?!”

I told her I couldn’t fly. Pixie dust is only for kids, so they can get to Neverland. Grown-ups are not allowed there, because it is the place where kids never grow up. Then I picked Emmy up and spun her around, because after all that hard work thinking happy thoughts, a little girl covered in pixie dust should definitely get to fly! We spent the afternoon playing “pixie dust”. The girls sprinkled each other with glitter and thought happy thoughts. I picked them up and flew them around. We ran out of glitter and our tummies hurt from giggling. Once we came back home from Neverland, the girls helped me sweep and vacuum what could be picked up. The rest of the glitter flecks worked their way into the carpet fibers and grooves of the wood floor, joining the ones that were already there. To taunt me until the end of time. Oh well.

So yes. Everything I own is covered in glitter. I just needed a little faith, trust and pixie dust to realize that I wouldn’t have it any other way.

If you liked reading about my silly kids in this post, you can read more about their antics here!