Place: A Five Minute Friday Reflection

There is often a great expanse of space between the "place" that I want to be and the place that I am...

This is currently the case for me professionally, personally,  and well...domestically.

Listen, I have aspirations for our house...the place where we do life...really, I do!

But, alas...I seem to be perpetually domestically challenged,  and so we all end up in this funny 'place' emotionally and literally with this place we call home.  This place we do life together.

I'd like this place that we intertwine as a family--where we share ideas, work through struggles--those we hold within, and the ones that stretch out, mingling with the moods and thoughts of all of the other family members-- I would like the place in which that all happens on a daily basis to feel more orderly...to be a lovely landscape for the happy and the hard. To not feel like it's adding to the chaos, but to feel like a balm to the busy. 

Our place, our home, does not currently feel like a balm to the busy. It feels like a busy bomb of life has scattered itself e-v-e-r-y-w-h-e-r-e. 

Queue the laughter...it's o.k. Laughing is better than whining...in my opinion anyway.

I honestly thought, with the advent of my youngest of three daughters heading off to school this year that our place would finally feel al little more settled-- that I would find more time to clean, more brain space to organize and order the stuff of our lives, that there would be more intentionality focused on making our place feel  like the "home" that I'd like it to be...the "home" in the pictures of my mind.

Candles lit, cool art and home decorations that reflect our "style", laundry nicely folded and ready to be put away, a spice cabinet that doesn't assault me with plastic bottles of cumin when I open the door...you know...the little things.

And yet, it still looks like this...

Alright, to be fair...the first two pictures were taken the week we had our rugs replaced in our entire upstairs three weeks ago...so the entire upstairs had to be carried downstairs, and then back upstairs again...which was lots of fun (and sounds like a premise for a Dr. Seuss book!).

(By the way, did you spot the dog in the first picture...a friend of my suggested we start an IG hashtag titled  #whereisTanner)

And the third picture...well, that's how my ADD brain gets me into trouble during holidays like Valentine's Day with 3 kids, who all requested different cards and when I volunteer to do crafts in my daughter's kindergarten classroom...

Which was also fun...but, messy..

But whether we're installing rugs or not, these picture do depict our "place" on a pretty regular basis (albeit a wee bit exaggerated here!): Our menagerie of life lived, ideas in process, and everything in between.

This is our place in life right now; busy, messy, trying to be more organized, and trying to love one another well in the process, despite the mess.




This post was inspired by Five Minute Fridays, a place where a whole bunch folks write about one word, for five minutes,  and then link up their ideas.

It's lots of fun, you should check it out!