HELP! MY HOME'S BECOME A TOY CHEST

All parents do it: Convert a sensible room into a pastel-colored baby palace decorated in cuteness, encompassing anything from Teddy bears to Muppet Babies.

I was thinking about this the other day because some friends of mine are getting ready to have a baby. They've turned a perfectly good room into a nursery.

It looks good right now; everything's nice and neat -- complete with a Noah's Ark motif. That's because there's no flood of toys yet -- no Little Tikes doll house, no Barney puzzles, no Big Bird pull toys, no children's books, and no kids' shoes, socks and other assorted clothing strewn about.

My friends don't know it yet, but their house will soon be crammed full of such things. I know our house is.

Parents soon discover that a house isn't a home, it's one giant, cluttered toy chest.

When my daughter Becca was born two years ago, I thought I was well prepared. I had a nursery -- wallpapered with stars in a rainbow of colors, wrapped up with a ceiling trim depicting circus animals and a clown.

Even with the crib, changing table and a set of drawers in the room, there was still plenty of space to move around -- and certainly plenty of room for toys, I reasoned.

I didn't realize that the Better-Homes-and-Gardens look lasts only until the baby's born. Then the toys start proliferating like cars in a junk yard.

They soon end up everywhere. Not even bathrooms are off limits. Becca has so many bath toys, it's hard to find the water.

Once kids get to the toddler stage, something unique occurs. The same toys move from room to room, always getting underfoot.

You find toys crammed under the couch, piled in front of the refrigerator and deposited under the kitchen table like debris from a tornado. What the house can't hold ends up scattered about the car.

You would think parents would put a freeze on new toys. We try, but there are too many neat toys out there. We want to play them too. Plus, toys come from doting grandparents and friends.

I know I get tired of tripping over the same Barney puzzle. It's refreshing to trip over something new.

And kids' clothes are as bad as toys. We keep hanging them up in Becca's closet only to find them soon scattered around the house. I'm convinced it's the work of a clutter elf, who races around sight unseen, creating clothes chaos.

In one night, I can pick up the same T-shirt a half-dozen times in different rooms throughout the house. Of course, I soon tire of this, figuring I might as well wait for the migration to stop before I pick it up. This also applies to toys, which is why they don't get picked up either.

It seems to me that parents need two houses -- one for all the toys and the other to live in. Either that, or we all have to live in television land where all the toys are kept backstage.

For my friends who will soon embark into the world of parenting, I have a suggestion: Take plenty of pictures of the nursery now. These snapshots will help you remember how charming it was before the clutter arrived.