Crumbs.

I spend a ridiculous amount of time sweeping up crumbs. Blizzards of them. It doesn’t matter what the kids are eating — bananas! — there will be crumbs. Like sawdust at a mill, they fly with every buzzcut nibble, no matter how many times I tell them to eat over their plates. If I used a rake instead of a broom, I could create my own zen garden underneath the kitchen table.

So I sweep. After every meal. After every snack. After every time I just finished sweeping but somebody just had to come back for one more bite of something she hadn’t quite finished. You’d be amazed at the crumbous fallout one last little bite can rain upon your freshly swept floor — unless you have kids, that is. Then you know too painfully well.

A lazy man might suggest putting it off until the end of the day, let the crumbs coalesce into dunes, and sweep them up all at once. I know, because I was that lazy man. And do you know what I found out? I found out that a truly lazy man will sweep early and often, because if he doesn’t, tiny little feet will ferry those crumbs to every corner of the house, like busy bees pollinating a grove of very flat polyurethaned trees. I can’t tell you how many times I have found what I thought were maggots in the baby’s room, only to be relieved to find it was only dried rice. Only to be unrelieved at the subsequent thought of what other natural ant baits were hiding there.

So. Sweep. Learn to love it.

And I do. Sort of. I mean, sweeping does have its zen-like appeal. It is a time I get to send the kids out of the room (shrieking, “Don’t walk in my dirt!” just like my mother used to) and savor a moment’s relative relief from my two little entropy machines. So long as I don’t think about the chaos that is going on in the next room while I’m restoring order to the kitchen floor.

What I need is a moment’s relative relief from these moments of relative relief. That’s why, as often as possible, I like to eat lunch somewhere other than home.

It’s a habit I developed in my single days. When you live alone and work at home, you need to do something to prevent you from turning into a pasty faced troll slaving beneath the bare bulb dangling from the basement ceiling joists. Similarly, when you stay home with kids all day, you need to get the heck out of the house. To remind yourself that the world is still populated by people tall enough to appreciate the extent of your thinning hair. And recall the crackling intellectual thrill of talking to a real live adult about something other than your kids. “Yes, make that a large drink.”

Best of all, you will dramatically increase your odds of sitting through an entire meal without having to get up for another glass of milk, or a different spoon,or a paper towel to mop up a spill, or no I wanted my apple with the skin off, no, on! ON! ON! dang it’s too late and I’m not going to cut up another apple just because you can’t make up your mind and I still haven’t had a chance to sit down and oh for the love of God can’t you eat over your plate it looks like Hansel and Gretel spent the last week wandering lost beneath your chair and—

Somebody else will sweep up the crumbs.