Kids – and game kits – are a beautiful mess

During the past year, my wife and I decided to go all in on the new adventures. We picked up our adorable black lab, Mozzie, in September of 2020. In January of 2021, I started work on my first commercial board game, Gamestormers. And, in April of 2021, we welcomed our daughter, Sloane, into the world. All three are beautiful… and extremely messy, heh.

Mozzie is a very sweet pup, but he is spoiled first and foremost by his parents. He also has a big fan in his grandparents on either side. All of this love translates into tons of doggy toys, treats, and goodies, which inevitably get strewn about our house.

Baby Sloane is no different. She has plenty of accessories all over the house – bouncy chairs, infant jungle gyms, and noise-making toys to stimulate her in each room. Little Sloane’s world is spread all over our living room, nursery, and even the bathrooms!

To add to the chaos, I’m in the midst of assembling the Gamestormers game prototype kits for our playtesters. It’s a wild combination of dry erase markers, blank dice with stickers, plastic counters, meeples of all colors of the rainbow, and much more! Currently, the table in our basement is taking the brunt of the playtesting kit mess, with all of the various parts scattered across the wooden tabletop. Someday we’ll get to use it as an actual table. Someday.

So, in short, our house is a disaster area. When we finally get one section clean, Mozzie dumps out his doggy toy bin all over the carpet. When we have some semblance of order, Sloane needs to have her jungle gym set up for some tummy time in the living room. And, when my wife finally thinks our basement is clean, I scatter thousands of little game assets all over the table and humbly ask for her help in putting together 40 kits for our beta testers.

It’s a mess. But it’s a beautiful mess. And it’s OUR mess. We love our daughter, Sloane. We love Mozzie the black lab. And we love what Gamestormers, the board game where you MAKE a game, is becoming. We love our beautiful messes, and we wouldn’t trade them for the world.

If you take anything away from this particular blog post, it’s this: embrace the mess. If your world is quite literally messy, it likely means that you’re up to something fun, creative, or worth the mess. Don’t judge yourself on the mess, but rather what the mess provides. For our dog, it’s engagement. For our daughter, it’s contentment. And for Gamestormers, each messy kit assembly means someone else joins us on the journey to enjoy making and playing games.

What’s your beautiful mess?