This is my Home

I am looking around at my house and wondering how it got so disorganized? I love being organized. I love knowing right where everything is in my house at any given time, and I really love purging my home of things I don't care about to keep away the clutter. I even love cleaning, which brings me to serious bewilderment when I take a quick look around at all the chaos I can see, and all the chaos I can't see, but I know is there. Like my mountain of laundry in the basement (both clean and dirty) and my file box that is topped with papers that should be inside of it but aren't. Or what about all the pillows and blankets in the living room? And icky sticky on my kitchen floor. How did this happen? I was starting to get a little frustrated with myself, but before I got very far a poem that my sister has up in her home popped into my mind. You will have to excuse me if this isn't exactly how it goes, I'm just going off memory.

Some houses try to hide the fact
That children shelter there,
Ours boasts of it quite openly
The signs are everywhere.
For smears are on the windows
Little smudges on the door,
I should apologize I guess
For toys strewn on the floor.
But I sat down with the children
And we played, and laughed, and read,
And if the doorbell doesn't shine
Their eyes will shine instead.
For if at times I'm forced to choose
The one job or the other,
I'd like to be a housewife
But first I'll be a mother.


And suddenly, all of the mess didn't look like mess, it looked like fun. The pillows and blankets are from the cool fort we built so Kendall and Bryan could play with their beloved flashlights. And the icky sticky is from letting them help me bake some treats to send to Ethan. And although the laundry isn't right where it belongs, we always have clean clothes to wear, that's a plus. Yes, I have a lot of work to do to get my house where I want it to be, but taking a little break to make sure we have great memories is totally worth it. One of the things I have realized is that the house always gets clean again. Always. Right now it might look like the Tasmanian Devil ransacked our home, but rather than just having a house to live in, we have a home that we love and one that reminds us of the importance of family. Now as I get ready to do some overdue housework, I am no longer doing it with the bad attitude of how did I let it get this bad. Instead, I now have a heart full of good family moments and am reminded that I keep my house clean so we have more time to have fun - and sometimes that fun is messy. Of course, that doesn't explain the terrible state of our file box, but just let me have this little victory.