Blog Party: I’ll Show You Mine…First Ever Edition (I know, right?)

It seems that I am not the only person who has had spring cleaning, organizing and perpetually messy homes on the brain this past week. Everywhere I turn it seems that various bloggers out there are sharing their hearts on organizing, spring cleaning and their personal journey of their eyes and hearts opening up to embrace the imperfect things about their homes.

I have asked my husband before what he thinks it is about needing a home environment to feel and look a certain way that can leave a feeling woman so out of sorts. He calmly answered that he had “no clue” about why the feminine brain sometimes works this way. And he’s probably right. After all, I’ve heard stories of bachelors subsisting off of not much more than ramen noodles and beer, whole bags of potato chips for dinner, a blanket and a pillow to sleep on – what are sheets??- and that’s pretty much it.

Men sometimes just aren’t as inclined as women to make sure that all of the aesthetic i’s are dotted and t’s are crossed. This isn’t to say that men want to live in squalor or in disgusting conditions. But if the paint colors don’t flow from room to room, are they gonna be that concerned?

Anyway, so yes, my brain and organizing – I’m not very good at it, but my heart cries out that I need to do it. Especially lately. But…then something good comes on the television, or the kids require me to make zoo animals out of play dough and I suddenly find myself very side tracked. But it always circles back around to haunt me, this lack of cohesion that my home has.

The fact that there are generally crumbs of some kind all. over. my floor. That the bathtub has a grime ring around it that always comes back way too quickly, even after I put in the energy and elbow grease on my hands and knees, balanced over the side of the tub trying furiously to get rid of it. I would love my home to be something more, but as I have explained to my husband before – it’s all about a choice.

We consciously make the choice, both he as a father and I as a mother, to invest a lot of our time into our children. To let them have “oops” moments and get paint or marker colors on the dining room table, because we would rather they feel free color and make rainbows. We would rather be outside or doing activities with them that max out our energy levels even if it means that we end up feeling less productive in the long run. Sometimes, we just let things lay where they end up at the end of the day because we are spent. And that’s okay with us.

This doesn’t mean that if you have a super organized and clean house that you’re doing something wrong. I’m just not as good at balancing the two, so I choose to put more energy into one over the other. And I pick my kids. The problem is that what I really need to do sometimes is pick up…the house.

The truth is though that it takes so much more than aesthetics to complete a home. There is so much more to it. Perhaps my desires this past week to nest and reorganize come from a place that says that it’s time. It’s time to make our home work for us, to make it have some sense of rhyme and reason. I don’t know what that is going to look like. Probably not like a page out of a magazine or from a board on Pinterest. I’ll figure all of that out lately.

I know that a good place to start with that, though, is acknowledging, accepting and being grateful for what you have to work with.

So, for today, I’m going to show you all something.

This is my living room…

 

JUST KIDDING.

THIS is my living room…

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

My living room. I have to move various toys and stuffed animals to sit down. I wish for the life of me that my coffee table would stay cleared off and free from stickiness, preferably at all times. I wish that the entire pack of markers pictured in the bottom photo wouldn’t be missing by the time that this post is published. But, it’s a room that’s lived in. Toys and other things really do have a place, they just don’t always end up in it. But it’s mine and I’m kind of okay with that.

And maybe it’s time that we as moms decide to be okay with what an occupied, busy home looks like. We can work on the organizing and decorating and caring about throw pillows part later.

If you want to get in on the blog party action then keep reading…

Here is what you do:

1.) I showed you mine, now you show me yours. Every time I host a “I’ll Show You Mine” blog party, I’ll pick something at random for us to show off. You take photos of the assigned topic for the week and post them to your blog. Write up a little diddy about your room if you wish, write-up what’s on your heart about making a home.

2.) Link back up to my blog in the comments section.

3.) If you share a link, and others have also shared, click on another link and go and show some love on another’s blog.

 

So this week, if you want to join in, share your living room. Don’t pick it up. Don’t take artsy fartsy pictures. Don’t flinch. Just take them and show it off. Open the virtual front door to your home and welcome us inside.