The kids were all making Fourth Lunch or whatever the meal is they make when they get home from school. (Never mind that dinner is two hours away, nothing but an entire four-course meal will do at 3:30 in the afternoon.)

I was rushing toward my espresso maker, planning to coax sweet nectar from its boiler, when I heard a loud THUD in the kitchen. I rounded the corner just in time to see the children frozen, eyes aimed downward. My youngest had dropped an entire Costco-sized jar of mayonnaise on the kitchen floor. Nobody dared move – least of all the kid who had mayonnaise spurted up his leg.

Without a word, I assessed the situation and discerned that it wasn’t the entire jar that now laced my kitchen with egg-based substance, merely the bit that had flown out of the top with such a force as to coat the nearby dishwasher before landing in a sad glump inside the floor register. (Aside: whoever thought a floor register in the highest traffic corner of my kitchen was a good idea is badly mistaken. I’m all for indoor heating and cooling, but don’t put the floor register in a location that has the highest potential for smashes, seepage, and spills.)

I grabbed a wad of paper towels and worked on Youngest’s leg, because: people first. But I had my eye on that floor register, just daring that glob to move any further down the vent before I finished cleaning the slippery stuff from my baby’s socks. As someone who isn’t a big fan of eggs, I could only imagine the distasteful smell that might emanate through every register in our home if I didn’t swiftly remove the Hellman’s from the Hole.

I handed a very slippery wad of paper towels to the Youngest and sent him to the trash can. Then I yanked the register out of the floor. I must have been very focused because I didn’t notice the silence that hung over the kitchen while I cleaned up the condiment-soaked innards. It was only when I turned back around to face Youngest and saw him standing very still, mayonnaise still congealed in his Adidas, watching my face. “Am I in trouble?” he asked carefully.

I blinked. Then I giggled. “No, dear. Not at all! You’ve got six older siblings. This is nothing!” My utter lack of reaction has been drummed into me by so many breaks and spills before you that I can’t even muster a hint of rage. “Now swipe that bit out of your shoelaces before it stains…”

And it’s true. Those blessed older siblings have systematically numbed my Reactor when it comes to physical damage. They’ve spread bodily fluids to the far corners of the house (who can forget the one who peed on my diploma?), they’ve made off with our coffee, tripped, fallen, and splooshed it onto the ceiling, and they’ve treated every lamp, every sofa, and every chair as if they were made of Little Tykes plastic and then acted surprised when it broke. They pick holes in the fluff of the pillows, poke their fingers through the wall closest to the toilet out of boredom, write with Sharpies on every available surface, forget to tell us the toilet is running and leaking through the ceiling, and reliably kill the lawnmower every season.

As Husband and I joke – Kids are the worst roommates ever.

We’ve lived with them long enough not to blink at the next minor calamity (although as the kids get bigger, the mistakes do, too). Maybe we’re mature enough to realize that all of these things are a temporal and rusty treasure – or maybe we’re just slightly dead inside.

Two things I know: 1 – Our younger kids are the beneficiaries of all this chill. We are better at discerning mistakes from mean intentions. (ProTip: broken household items are almost never the result of mean intentions, just thoughtlessness.) Our reactions are decidedly less screechy than they were ten years ago.

2 – The day is coming, very soon, in fact, when my house will be clean and nothing will ever get broken and I will miss these horrible roommates with every fiber of my being. We raise them to leave, I know. I will send them out with joy and only a little weeping, I promise. But as my older kids are thinking about college and my Baby announces his disgust with dinosaurs as “kid stuff,” I feel this broken nest we live in getting too small for all the fluffy feathered wings they are beginning to sprout.

Here’s the good news: I’ve got stories to keep me giggling, even with slightly wry laughter, for years. (Although not ever sure Hubby will find that second broken weedwhacker funny.) Husband and I will savor those stories, tell them over and over to potential kid spouses and future grandbabies, and settle into our sofa, that hasn’t moved across the floor on a daily basis from overzealous plopping, to look forward to the day when our favorite roommates come back to visit and start clogging up the plumbing again.

It’s a broken nest, full of broken people. But I’m so grateful we’ve crashed around in it together.