Before we welcomed our first son, we took great time and care to write a Bible verse on the wall of his room, a verse about being strong and courageous and favored, and then we meticulously painted half the wall mustard yellow and the other half a rich blue, because our baby was going to be surrounded by bold colors that would awaken the artist within him.

Or some nonsense like that.

And then, the first time he had quiet time in his room with crayons, those walls we’d worked so hard to paint and decorate were covered with primitive cave drawings.

We patiently painted over his drawings and explained to him that walls were not for drawing pictures on, but he could use paper, and he could have all the paper he wanted, and he said he understood, and he never did it again. And then we had more children, and our hands were so busy trying to keep them all out of the trash and the toilet and the garage where all the junk lives, for now, that occasionally our attention would shift and one kid would break free from parent eyes and before we knew it they’d colored an entire wall red.

And of course we couldn’t just forbid them to use crayons, because how would they find their artistic expression if we set them in front of a blank sheet of paper without any drawing supplies and said, “Use your imagination”? But we really didn’t want to see all our walls covered in scribbles that could have been a plant or a tiger or something else entirely, like maybe the wind.

It quickly became an impossible thing to regulate, this art and drawing time, because as soon as you took the crayons away from one 3-year-old twin, the other one was having his heyday on the stairs with a slab of red oil pastel, and before you knew it there were curly lines and flourishes leading all the way to your bedroom door, and it would just take too much effort to clean it up. So instead of cleaning up, we gave up.

Of course they know, still, that walls are not for drawing on. But when a new mural shows up, we hardly notice anymore. Eventually, we plan to turn all the walls into hand-painted murals, assigning each boy a wall when they can draw a whale that actually looks like a whale, and we’ll take great pride in our artistic walls. For now, we’ll just be content with a preview of what’s to come: spiders that are supposed to be humans, scribbled all over the twins’ closet walls with a crayon they keep hidden God knows where. A red door, courtesy of the 6-year-old when he was 3. A bathroom door with blue pen scribbles that, when you turn your head a certain way, might just look like letters, which the 5-year-old drew when he was 3. (If you haven’t noticed, there seems to be a recurring age at which our walls are decorated by budding artists. Seems my kids decide to be wall artists right about the time they turn 3. That’s precisely what makes 3-year-olds so delightful, I suppose.)

It doesn’t matter who did it, no one will fess up, and most of the time I know exactly who it was, because it’s usually the kid who wears the age of 3, as I’ve already mentioned. My guess is that 3-year-olds are right in that maddening time when they understand that drawing on the walls isn’t allowed but are just young enough to still have zero impulse control when they see a blank spot on the wall that most definitely, no questions asked, no consequences considered, needs to be filled with color. They also seem to think a green scribble would look nice on the floor between the red wine stain my aunt left me one Christmas and the oil spot Husband accidentally made one day when he came in looking like the underside of a car. And they clearly, as if all that isn’t enough, think the couch needs some swirly lines, but they’ll need a permanent marker for that, thanks for asking.

I thank my lucky stars every time I see a drawing and it’s either chalk or crayon, because at least these things are washable if we actually have the energy to pick up a rag, but permanent marker, well, the answer to that is in the name. We try hard to keep permanent markers away from the kids, but somehow they always turn up. They contribute to things like turning a yellow shirt into a black-and-yellow-striped shirt. They make whiskers on cheeks and hair on a forehead, so one of them will go to school looking like a lion, and you’ll have to send a note to his teacher. They mark notes on the piano keys, “because it helps me remember which is which,” said the one who should have known better.

Kids will always find permanent markers. And I’m telling you, you’ve never known terror until you notice a permanent marker is missing from the place it was just a few minutes ago. Who has it? What are they doing with it? And worse: What are they planning to do?

We will knock ourselves out trying to find it, and we will not be able to until that next great masterpiece shows up on the bookshelf. How fortunate. There’s the marker. Right next to the self portrait that looks like a caterpillar.

Unexpected drawings on all the surfaces of a home—they are the highlight of a parent life. Who else gets to talk about fine art in all the places you would least expect, like the bathroom, when you’re sitting on the toilet and notice a new masterpiece on the wall in front of you. Who else gets to call the artist right in and ask them what they were thinking and actually get the answer? Who else gets to call said artist Son or Daughter?

We’re surely privileged people.

This is an excerpt from The Life-Changing Madness of Tidying Up After Children, the second book in the Crash Test Parents series. To get access to some all-new, never-before-published humor essays in two hilarious Crash Test Parents guides, visit the Crash Test Parents Reader Library page.