My house vs. Pinterest house

 

On pinterest they have lots of ideas to make your home beautiful and organized.

One idea is to have places for each person to put their things in each room. I do this, but because we have a lot of people, it doesn't quite look as nice as it should.

For example, here's pinterest's organized entryway.

I actually do this. I have labeled places for each child's school bag, and a shelf, et cetera.

Except in my house, it looks like this:

Not bad. But not Martha Stewart quality, by any means.

Now this idea, for the laundry room, using an individual basket for each person's clean clothes, which they will then (theoretically) put away in their rooms.

 

 

 

Again, this is actually an idea I use at my house. Only my version doesn't look so great.

Yeah. Not so much with the putting away....

Okay, one more. Pinterest organized bathroom:

Now my kids' bathroom:

Oh well. At least we can find stuff, right?

Sometimes....

images from http://www.repinly.com/

Laundry

If you think from my title that this is going to be a blog with tips for doing laundry, I am sorry to tell you...

You are reading the wrong blog.

See the sidebar. I do not give advice. (You've been warned!)

(image from sterilite.com)

I tell you what's happening in my life. And here is what is happening right now:

I'm drowning in laundry!

And for those of you who say, "Well, get off the computer and start dealing with your laundry!"....

You are reading the wrong blog.

Don't offer me solutions! I want to complain.

The laundry situation is getting really bad around here.

And since I have no shame (as has previosuly been obvious in this blog), I will show you a picture of how bad it really is.

I have so much clean laundry piled up waiting to be folded that I can't get to the machine to wash all the dirty laundry that is piled up elsewhere.

No, I didn't take a picture of the dirty laundry. Trust me, it looks worse.

In my defense, I do have a laundry system in place, with a dirty basket, a clean basket, and a basket for each person's folded items. The problem is, we have seven people in this house.

I think my baskets just aren't big enough.

I'm not sure they MAKE baskets big enough, actually.

Should I rent a dumpster?

Oh, and if you were expecting the end of this blog to show an "after" picture of how I've taken care of all this laundry now, and my house is all clean......

Again. You are reading the wrong blog.

(image from http://www.hometowndumpsterrental.com/)

Trash Day Dilemma

A confession: I have three big boxes in my garage that I haven't unpacked since our last move.

Which was almost a year ago now.

I know. It's embarrassing.

So I started thinking, If I haven't needed this stuff for almost a year, I really don't need it. Right?

(image from green-mom.blogspot.com)

Then the idea came to me: Just get rid of the boxes!

Trash day was coming up. What if I just dragged all three boxes out to the curb, unopened?

Oh, the liberating idea!

I may have mentioned before I have a recurring fantasy about stuffing everything in my house into a giant black trash bag and just starting over. Sometimes I think it's the only way my house will ever be clean.

Of course, I can't really throw away all our stuff. But those three boxes......

I resolved to do it.

So the night before trash day, I stood in my garage, trying to get up the nerve to drag those boxes out by the trash can.

Then I made a fatal mistake.

I LOOKED INSIDE THE BOXES.

I know. STUPID!

So it started: "I can't throw away this!"

"Oh, this is still good! I should really give it to Goodwill or something."

"What if I need this later on?"

 Et cetera.

Of course, the upshot of the whole thing is.....

I still have three big boxes in my garage that I haven't unpacked since our last move.

Dessert and Glitter

We've been going to Family Night at the chapel on post. On Tuesday night they have dinner and then Sunday-school-type classes for kids and adults.

(image from http://schools.fwisd.org)

I love not having to plan, cook, and serve dinner one night a week.

It takes so little to make Mommy happy sometimes.

Anyways, this week the chapel decided on an interesting theme to liven up the dinner portion.

It was called "Eat Dessert First."

Words to strike fear in any Mommy's heart.

Especially one who is going to be teaching a group of six-to-nine-year-olds after the meal.

Most especially if she knows the Sunday school lesson for the day will involve......GLITTER.

So basically, I realized I was going to have to teach/entertain/wrangle twenty kids after they'd loaded up on cake, cookies, and brownies.

Oh, and by the way, the lady that usually teaches music (thereby relieving me of twenty minutes of class time) doesn't want to do it today. Because of said sugar-load-up, of course.

Can you say....Show the kids a Bible story video? I knew you could.

But we still had to do the glitter project.

(This is Jesus calming the storm by the way.)

And here's a picture of all the glitter stuck in Boo's hair after class.

You should have seen the OTHER kids...