“So what do you do for fun?” I asked my new friend.

“Oh, I straighten my kitchen,” she replied.

Straightening does not sound like much of a hobby. Was this woman joshing with me?

Nope. She was serious; she got a thrill from straightening forks. Okay, I’m an open-minded person. I can handle this. Breathe deep.

“Oh my gosh,” she said, “excuse the mess.” I looked around frantically for a sign of a mess.

She went over to a table and straightened two stray bits of paper. There was not a hint of dust and no other papers.

“I’ve been asking my husband to deal with that all day,” she said. All day, I thought, not weeks or months? This person can NEVER come to my house, I thought.

When I walk into someone’s house and there are toys and books everywhere, I think, ‘these are my people’. I feel comfortable, as long as there are no bugs or smell. Warm fuzziness spreads throughout my being.

Right now, my house looks like a nuclear glitter bomb exploded. There are three different colours of glitter forming a two-inch deep carpet in my living room. Some came from my daughter’s last craft project and some from when I rolled over a glitter vial with a chair wheel.

It’s not that I don’t try, occasionally. But living with a small artsy child is like living with Tinker Bell; wherever she goes she leaves a trail. At the weekend she carefully cut out one hundred butterflies and taped them to the hallway wall. It was really pretty but, of course, this involved leaving cut-up paper, scissors, tape, her shoes and her toy dog that came along for company, in the hallway.

“Clean that up,” I yelled. When I looked again, the items were gone.

Walking down the hallway later, I tripped over a lump under the rug. I pulled back the rug to find the things I’d told her to put away. She shrugged and said: “I thought I might need them later.”

I should clean that up, I thought. I put the rug back in place and made a mental note to walk around that spot.