Entropy and the Four-Year-Old

...or three-year-old, or two-year-old, or any child for that matter! You can count on a lot of things when you have a child: late nights, diapers, sickness, hugs, messes etc., but one thing I did not count on was the complete and utter derangement which children bring to the physical household. It's almost laughable.

I have to start by saying, I was not born a neat person. There is a photograph from when I was about eight, where I am lying flopped on a mattress on my floor, looking completely crestfallen. The source of my upset is not, as you might guess, something traumatic or sad, but instead merely that I had to clean my room. If you expand your attention beyond the girl on the bed, you will see that she is floating on the aforementioned mattress, surrounded by a foot high sea of debris. Sigh...I have not been neat, no. When I was pregnant with Elena, I prayed for an anal rententive child. In short, I DID NOT GET MY WISH.

Elena is a lot of wonderful things: creative, bright, interesting, articulate and energetic. The problem is that she likes to explode all over the house. All the explosions have some meaning to her, and on my more magnanimous days, I have fun trying to discern the meaning. On my less amused days, I feel overwhelmed and discomfited. This morning, I must be in a more generous mood. I captured some of this little outcroppings on film. This exercise of photographing some of the odder combinations was inspired by a game a friend of mine used to play in college. Silly, half-drunk college kids that we were, would walk to the grocery store and roam around looking for acts of the supermarket vandal. We would look for items furthest from their home, or in the funniest location. The fungal cream in the ice cream freezer, or the side of meat nestled among the fresh flowers...these things would crack us up!

The juxtaposition of ball and unicorn don't make me laugh on their own, but it's the addition of the potato masher that really gets me going.

Tupperware should be outlawed in our house as containers become tidal pools, collecting random bits.