A stay-at-home, play-at-home, unpack-and-put-away day. Sounds doable, hunh? Well, it strikes fear in my very being. I am beginning to see a pattern:  We come home from a trip with loads of randomly thrown together stuff; I put off unpacking (in part because the house is still a bit wrecked from the packing, and the unpacking simply reveals this); I distract myself with outings, play dates, and errands; I snap at wee loved ones for making a new mess on top of my mess; and I become overwhelmed and sort of paralyzed.

So Tuesday I was not feeling upbeat when I declared it such a day. It's a challenge for me because not only do I lose sight of how or where to begin, I also feel anxiety about the kids not having fun or missing out on social things to stay home with their irritable "cleaning up" Mom, who has only fuzzy ideas about how to accomplish the job at hand.

So Tuesday starts off with me saying yes to Halina's finger paint request first thing in the morning, when I'm still in my jammies. Did I enjoy that activity? Was I a bit prickly about the paint that got everywhere and the complaint-filled bath that was required 20 minutes later? Not so much, and yes.

Cut to noon and I'm still in my jammies. I think we had a couple more art projects by then. Some sand and water play set up and clean up. Oh yeah, and an elaborate chalk road and parking lot for the cozy coupe to drive on.

Had unpacking and house tidying occured? Negative.

I gave in and called a friend. I asked her over with her little ones for a play date around 4:00. That got me in gear. God forbid someone should see my house in this state.

Only I had to rearrange the living room furniture as a first step.

Now I know that is insanely off point. But sometimes a big, off-point task provides the energy that I need to tackle the mountain of mundane minutia that unpacking within a very small and very cluttered  house represents.

So I moved some furniture around, vaccuumed, put toys away, and felt a lot better.

At four my friend came. She gamely dug into the dishes and suggested that I was making a bit of a boogey man out of the suitcases. She was right. They were unpacked in about 30 minutes.

The table was still covered in a heap of bags filled with random junk from my car, but I knew I could pick away productively at that now that the suitcases where no longer in the house.

As for the kids, they did okay. There was a lot of neediness and meandering at first. Some claims of torturous boredom. And at one point I channeled parents from a bygone era and told them to go play outside. They were barred from the house for 45 minutes.

This reminds me of something else: Like me, Halina actually craves and requires alone time every day. She eventually finds a way to get off by herself and after she does she leaves behind these lovely, silent scenes that I'll come upon later. Each is an enchanted still life, a peek inside the brain of their young creator. Like this one. I love her for them.