Challenging Myself

The blog world is so fun, inspiring, creative, sharing, and caring.  On the other hand, it can be deceptive, one side of the story, and not the whole picture.  Who wants to post a photo of their messy home up?  Or who posts it without a tagline saying "excuse my messy home?"  Not me, no siree!  Alas, maybe I should sometimes... to remind me and others that this is life right now.  Sure we pick up the toys every night, but sometimes, I wonder if for those few minutes of peace and tranquility in the morning are worthwhile when within seconds, it becomes a ruin once more.

So I want to challenge myself to step away from the confines of society and dare to be real about our current situation.  Our apartment is small, there's improvised shelves created above our kitchen for boxes to be stored, more storage boxes on top of the doors where most people probably put nice looking plants, flat boxes stored underneath our bed and the guest bed (that is crammed next to Jordan's crib in his room), and no room for added wall decorations due to a 4 holes per wall rule and us already spending too much money on 4M sticky stuff.  Our second child will sleep in a pack and play inside our closet or our room, and the dining table serves as an occasional dining area, my everyday work space, our craft table, the mail drop off, and a load of other random junk we have nowhere else to put, and our rug is infested with droppings of food, sauces of some sort, and other things I don't care to imagine, or how our clothes are folded neatly (most of the time, other times they are thrown on) atop of our Target clear bins because the closet doesn't have that many built in shelving units, and sometimes, I find myself sitting in our closet typing away as I am scanning or printing stuff because that's where my printer is.  It may be small and crammed and not perfectly ideal in the picture world of model homes, but it is our happy place, our home, and where our hearts are.    

This time in life is short.  This time will be a fond look back one day.  This time of careful budgeting and celebration on pay day will be limited.  This is the time we are supposed to treasure when we are living in big homes with marble kitchen countertops, kitchen islands, wood floors, and wood curtain panels (how I dream of such a day!).  This is a time to enjoy and savor, for it will be over before we know it, and we will be looking back at that tiny apartment next to the golf course that we so loved for one short year.  Or the days when our living room was our play room and our guest room was our baby's room.

So I am challenging myself to overlook the piles of clothing I haven't folded in the backgrounds of photos I've taken and hesitate to post.  I am challenging myself to stop caring about how messy the house might be and just enjoy it for a bit.  And I am challenging myself to ignore the nasty towel smell I sniff everywhere because our towels can't seem to dry before we use them again (ugh, but really we need to do something about that one).  Challenge begins... NOW!