Bubble under stress test

 

Last weekend, one of Highflyer's brothers with wife and two (very lively and energetic) boys, four and six years old, stayed at the country house as they departed to a two months trip to Asia from Vienna on Sunday night. I jokingly call Highflyer's teenage boys (16 and 19 now)"savages" as the house looks super messy whenever they visit and their rooms in particular as if several bombs had detonated, but pre-school boys are on another level, oh yes. I already knew that from my friends' kids, but when they are houseguests, it's on another level. We have off-white carpets in the living room and I struggled not to mentally count the times they ran through the house with either their sandals on, or barefoot after having run through wet grass and soil, not mentioning Nutella-stained fingers touching the wall and other surfaces. I outwardly remain calm and suggest wiping off feet and washing hands, but inwardly I am like "WTF, how do parents cope with this on a daily basis?!" I really like my place clean and relatively tidy and while Highflyer is also pretty messy and has an impressive degree of "dust-blindness" I manage to create a calm and decently clean bubble whenever there are no relatives visiting and I sometimes wonder if I could even have managed to live with kids who leave plastic toys, fingerprints and stains everywhere. Guess not.