My husband and son have nightly pillow-talk sessions. My son always gets to pick the topic and, because he’s seven and his focus tends to change a lot, there’s no telling what will be discussed. I can hear bits of their talks from where I tend to sit in my bedroom and I can honestly say that eavesdropping on them is one of the highlights of my day.

On this evening’s agenda was our impending move to Maryland. More specifically the house we will be renting, which we found on our recent trip to the Bethesda area over spring break. Though I couldn’t hear all of the conversation, I could make out one piece of it. It seems my son was concerned about the cleanliness of the new house, specifically the bathrooms.

“Dad, the toilets were really gross,” I overheard my boy say with disgust. “They were so dirty, and the sinks and the showers, too. I don’t think that guy even cleans!”

He had a point. When we toured the place, it was obvious the current tenant must have had more, ahem, pressing matters than tending to household chores, but nothing a little elbow grease couldn’t handle. What I couldn’t figure out was why my son was even a tiny bit concerned about it.

Now it might be understandable if he were a bit of a clean freak, but though my youngest has lots of qualities about him to love, keeping a sparkly bathroom isn’t one of them. I mean one shift of brushing teeth in the morning and the top of the vanity looks like a Crest-fueled Jackson Pollock painting. One time I actually found toothpaste on the underside of the toilet bowl. The idea that a finger touched a toilet and a toothbrush in such rapid succession, well, I just can’t even go there.

And speaking of toilets, please, is there some magical way for boys to get all of what is coming out of them in the bowl? At the age of three my middle son could throw a grape from across the dining table and knock over my daughter’s cup of milk. Yet he still, at age ten, seems to have trouble aiming one simple, tiny stream of liquid into a very large body of water by comparison. When exactly does this skill kick in? Because at this rate I’m ready to purchase stock in Clorox. Or yellow grout.

Both of my boys seemed to have developed their own clever method of dealing with their poor aim issue: Just wash the floor with the water from the shower. How do they do this? Simple. Always, always forget to be sure the curtain liner is inside the tub while the shower is on . Within about three minutes after turning on the knob, the floor is completely soaked. Not long after that the dogs are marching down the hall and into the bathroom for their own special version of Slip-n-Slide.

Once the shower turns off, I hear the dreaded “whoa!” and know it’s time to grab the stack of rags reserved for just this occasion unless, of course, I happen to be out of earshot. If so I’ll usually come in to find a boy using one of the brand new bath towels to sop up water and muddy paw prints from around the base of the toilet. In which case I tell him to be sure to get the glob of toothpaste on the bottom of the bowl.

Sometimes the floor is magically dry, the vanity remains a blank canvas, and my boys each pitch a no-hitter into the toilet, but they still can’t seem to leave the bathroom without making their mark on it. So they use a time-honored tradition passed down for generations that has irritated mothers and kept otherwise perfectly clean bathrooms from ever staying that way: They leave me a “laundry love letter”.

A dirty sock, a pair of pants in a pile on the floor next to the shower (underwear still in them of course), or a used hand towel on the top of the toilet tank just for me. Just a little something to let me know they were there and not thinking of me. And I, in turn respond the way many a mother has before me: With an eye roll you, too.

So far our household has been very lucky. The boys have shared their own bathroom and my daughter has had one to herself; but in the next house, all three kids will need to use the same facilities. Unlike her brothers, my girl is known for keeping a sparkly bathroom.

I’ll hold out hope that maybe some of my daughter’s cleanliness will rub off onto her brothers. But my guess is that I should probably be bracing myself for the day when some of her brother’s toothpaste rubs off onto one of her favorite pieces of clothing.

Oh well, as long as it stays off the toilet I’ll consider it a step in the right direction.