If You Are Having A Rough Week

Could your week be going better? Just in case you are having a rough week, I thought I’d give you a peek into ours. It just might make you feel better about your day and your maternal skills.

Let’s start with the kitchen floor. I swept it 24 hours prior to this photo being taken. Twenty. Four. Hours. And then my children happened. Apparently it was a good day to drop balls of red play dough on the floor. Clearly plastic lids needed to be torn up. All of this is essential to life, the day after mommy sweeps the floor.

This sink? It was totally clean this morning. How does this even happen? It’s like the sink auto re-fills every time I leave the room. I don’t get it.

Over on the kitchen ledge there’s this adorable box. Christmas cards, for last year. I didn’t send out a single one of them. No letters written, no envelopes addressed. I guess it turns out that once you are writing for a living, taking the time to craft a carefully worded Christmas newsletter doesn’t happen quite as easily. I do have all the stamps ready though, so I could still get these out to our loved ones. Maybe I’ll cross out “Christmas” and let it read “Merry Easter” instead.

 

This is my son’s room. I bought awesome new organizational boxes at Ikea this month. I love them, they’ve made it so easy to clean his room. But this still happens within a few hours of me cleaning it. This was literally about 6 hours between a sparkling bedroom and a tornadoed bedroom. Crazy. I can’t blame it all on my son, he’s actually pretty decent about keeping his room tidy, it’s when his sister comes in his room she takes about 3.5 seconds to dump out every box and bin in the room. Sissa the tornado.

 

This is her room. I don’t even try. I’m actively teaching the 4 year old to keep his space clean, but the 2 year old? Not so much. Pretty much just pink chaos in her room. Careful!

 

This is my son’s bed. All manner of stuffed animals live here. Also about 5 different blankets and bed sheets. Adorable, soft and wonderful right? I never thought this was a bad thing. Until he threw up in his bed in the middle of the night this week and I had to clean it off of roughly 47 different cloth items. His bed will be much more bare from now on.

 

Aren’t these yellow sticks cute? I plan to hang them under some photos in my dining room. I purchased them in September of last year. They are still sitting on a shelf waiting to be hung. It’s only been 5 months. Normal, right?

 

This is why I hung this sign. I don’t want a crazy mess of a house, but sometimes crazy things happen. Sometimes your husband has surgery and then the rest of the family get the stomach flu and it’s just about survival, not perfection.

Honestly, it’s never about perfection. It’s about the love that a home holds. Yes, we work on cleaning the rooms, and I swept up that messy floor before I wrote this post. But this is real life. The floor won’t stay swept and the dishes won’t stay done. There’s a frustration there, but there’s also beauty. There’s life bursting from every corner of our home. Every beautifully imperfect mess and every moment that I spend cleaning them once again. It is time well spent, even through the exhaustion and sighs of cleaning the same thing every day.

 

It’s a crazy, messy life that we lead as moms. In so many more ways than one. Here’s to embracing the mess, so we can find joy in it, as we clean it once again.