It’s time to adjust your expectations when it comes to your kids and clutter
DOUBLE TROUBLE FOR A FIRST-TIME DAD OF TWINS
IT’S very important to forget how your house used to look before children. There’s no other way to deal with the emotional impact of watching your home disintegrate around you.
It starts fairly modestly with the arrival of a sterilizer, a playmat and a few clothes from relatives.
Cupboards gently fill up but nothing, nothing can prepare you for eight months later, when it looks like Mothercare after a ram raid.
We’ll start with the hallway, which now holds a double buggy, pointless vases and a variety of tiny gloves and hats.
This buggy was supposed to live under the stairs but this is now home to car seats, carrycots, which are too small, buggy pods, which are too big and lots of stuff in bags that we don’t need yet.
The living room is the ‘playzone’ and packed with big inflatable things, small inflatable things, water-filled things, soft plastic things shaped like animals, things with fur on them, things with animal faces on them and many more things the twins like to put in their mouths.
Every day, I fall over, sit or stand on a thing of some description in that room.
The dining room now holds a dismantled double bed from what is now the twins’ room,
which we don’t want to give or throw away, so is stuck in limbo between functionality and pointlessness. I’m also fairly sure there used to be a table in there but it hasn’t been seen for months due to all the junk.
Moving into the kitchen, we notice a total of eight plug sockets are all full. Never in my wildest imagination did I imagine we’d fill that many. The worktop looks like a branch of Currys.
Obviously, all the cupboards are full. There’s even a shelf dedicated to dummies. And what used to be a seating area for calm consideration is now for nappy changing, clothes drying and baby bathing.
It reminds me of the Eliminator in Gladiators (popular Nineties TV show in which muscular men wore leotards) every time I try to negotiate a way in without injury.
Upstairs can be summed up by saying we used to have three bedrooms but now have two, plus a room full of things we haven’t got the courage to throw away.
The general plan to combat our accumulation of objects is to wait until the house is completely full, move to a slightly bigger house, and continue ad infinitum until we run out of borrowing power.
Or I could just secretly start selling things. So if anybody wants a bed, don’t hesitate to get in touch.