When The Engineer picked us up from the airport Wednesday night and took us home, it was a pleasant homecoming. He'd worked very hard to tidy up the house, and I was able to smile and feel
home instead of being overwhelmed with what I'd need to do the next day.
Then Thursday my two adorable little daily hurricanes made landfall again, and I found myself looking around, groaning at the mess. Often I feel so unsettled just with the everyday stuff that ends up all over the place when small children are in the house.
But that day I started trying to look at that stuff differently. My house is not going to look like a model home most of the time. Even when we tidy up, it will quickly get untidy again. What I'm realizing, and trying hard to internalize, is this:
It's okay for a house to look "lived in."
My life feels unsettled when I'm cluttered, and in realizing that over the last few years, I've become somewhat better at reining in the clutter. But now I am challenging myself to learn to be at peace even when my house looks like a house where two little kids live.
It's disgusting if I go a year without cleaning a bathroom. It's not disgusting to have children's books strewn about.
It's unsanitary to leave dirty dishes on the countertop for weeks at a time. It's not unsanitary to have a stack of mail on the table that I haven't gone through because kids have needed me. Or even because I chose instead to read a few blogs.
And while it's a good thing for kids to have clean clothes to wear, it's okay if I've gotten so busy that it takes a few days to get all those clean clothes folded.
I'm realistic--I know I'm not going to have a perfectly tidy house most of the time. So hopefully just by changing my viewpoint, my emotions will follow (eventually,) so that I won't feel so unsettled when the house that we live in looks lived in.
