One of the things that never ceases to amaze me about my daughters is how quickly they can destroy a room. Not in terms of using pry-bars and reciprocal saws to tear out drywall and take a place down to the studs, of course. Cleaning up something like that would be easy. And a one-time deal, too.

No, with my daughters, the level of destruction they can inflict on our living room, in particular, is way beyond that resulting from the effects of any home-improvement demo job. And they do this every day. I leave for work before my wife and our daughters are up and when I do, the place looks mostly like a couple of sane people live there. When I get home, it’s an entirely different matter.

Toys are, of course, scattered everywhere. There are also usually a few assorted pieces of clothing hanging off a piece of furniture, or lying on the floor, where I know there wasn’t anything when I headed out the door in the morning. A couple of random shoes, whether matching or not, are also ready to be tripped over. And then there are the cereal bowls on the coffee table. My daughters, Maddo and Little Sis, may not have eaten any of their Honey Nut Cheerios or Raisin Bran, but they certainly manage to use some of it as a new coating on the coffee table, complete with their spoons stuck to the solidified sweetened milk on the table top. Honestly, the place looks like how I imagine the U.S. Embassy did after the Fall of Saigon in 1975.

Christmas only lends to the chaos, as all the packaging from gifts becomes magnetically attached to every square inch of floorspace around our home. And among those gifts this year were enough Barbie dolls to give each Kardashian bimbo seven of her own.

Do the math. That’s right: 21 new Barbie dolls, nearly all of which were some sort of Disney character “princess” [Or, in the case of The Little Mermaid collection, one each of Prince Eric and King Triton]. That meant 21 new dolls for my daughters to play with, and to include with their daily trail of domestic detritus.

Almost immediately upon getting their hands upon the new Barbies, my girls ripped their clothes off. Now, I grew up with one younger brother. We didn’t have Barbies. We played with toy guns, sports equipment and the only “doll” of any kind was G.I. Joe. And we certainly didn’t think about stripping Joe to his birthday suit. No, we used Joe to beat up and fight other G.I. Joes. So when my daughters took their Barbies’ clothes off, and left them looking like hookers in various states of undress, I was concerned.

My wife shook off my fears. “This is what girls do. Don’t worry about it.”

Of course, almost as soon as one of my daughters would turn Cinderella into “Sinderella”, they would come up to me, wanting me to put the doll’s clothes back on. This would lead to an exchange along these lines…

Me: Maddo? Why do you want me to put Cinderella’s clothes on if you just took them off?

Maddo: Because she needed to get ready for the ball!

In a way, it was hard to argue with that. At least Maddo knew the ball would be dress appropriate.