It's reaching the end of the school year crescendo with things being brought home from their classrooms. Art projects, handouts and indistinguishable writing that might have been crucial notes in the social lives of elementary schoolers are littering my kitchen.

I love my children, but a huge part of me would just enjoy putting all their precious items of self-discovery into a garbage bag and throwing them into the shed out back, saving them for days when I'm feeling particularly nostalgic or need to procrastinate work with a project that just can't wait.

Or I could give those bags all back for them to wade through before they leave for college; it'll start them on a more hidden journey of adulthood — taking care of their detritus.

I recently heard someone saying that being an adult is finding new things to clean, organize or maintain. What needs maintenance, in particular, routinely feels like random checkpoints you hit while playing a game. Now we need to clean the compression coils on the fridge? There's a grease filter on a microwave? I'm on constant alert for new home-keeping advice, making sure I've been oiling the Thingamabob that runs the vitally important Doohickey, which, if left undone, will bring untold doom to me and mine.

That said, I went down a rabbit hole of the internet and learned how quickly dryer lint can burn the whole house down, and now I'm very fastidious with my dryer lint. I even got a wild hair to use the leaf blower to propel any trapped lint out of the aluminum pipe attached to the dryer. What chunks I didn't pick up, the doves around the neighborhood probably had a field day making their nest extra bougie with this year. Good deeds all around.

But the internet can provoke a component of crazy-making in cleaning. A stray comment about how self-cleaning ovens might be dangerous led me down a path to being at least glad that I had never really used that feature on ours. Phew.

Lucky for me, I never really caught on with wherever the Joneses post up their cleaning or home decor plans, so I'm not up to date on trends beyond giving in to my Earth mother vibes during the pandemic when I added more plants in my home than I should really be responsible for. Especially when a random plant I bought decided it needed to be home for gnats because it wanted to be extra precious.

The other night before bed, I watched a gagging Australian woman respond to a video suggesting that we all must open our kitchen drains and find the tremendously ignored gunk that has accrued since it was installed. The smell, if her reaction, foreshadows a good time.

"Do we even want to know?" I asked my husband.

"We can think about it," he replied. "Tomorrow."

But I know I'm in the trenches when it comes to cleaning, especially with a couple of kiddos. The slow slide of toys from their hands, as it comes wave by wave from their rooms, brought home from birthday parties, or outings with their grandma who cannot resist cherubic pleas for just one more Hot Wheels. A place for everything and everything in its place until you run out of storage and patience, and decide just to make peace with your moment in time because, sadly, this too shall pass.

The socks strewn all over the living room will grow in size and be confused with your spouse's. Then, in a blink, they'll be gone. We'll then wait for the next wave of toys and perhaps be the ones who can't resist the pleas and know that there's always a place under the couch for one more Hot Wheels next to the next generation of dust bunnies.

Cassie McClure is a writer, millennial, and unapologetic fan of the Oxford comma. She can be contacted at cassie@mcclurepublications.com. To find out more about Cassie McClure and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com.

Photo credit: Susan Holt Simpson at Unsplash