I am in awe of my neighbor’s home. Truly, it is a thing of beauty. She has two children, double the number I have, to be precise. Yet her living room is free of visible clutter, even when I walk in the door unexpectedly. Maybe she has a magic broom.
I’m no hoarder, but my daughter’s stuff does threaten to take over our home regularly, I’d say more than once a day. In our living room we have a side table that holds dress ups, and many of the toys are collated in neat baskets in an Ikea cabinet. However, the selection of baby strollers and stuffed toys near our fireplace and the four foot high dollhouse next to the sliding glass doors gives away that a four-year-old inhabits our house and regularly makes it into a catastrophic mess.
Then there is the rec room. Now, we are blessed to have such a thing, a little extra space in which to live. However, the rec room is generally called the wreck room for a reason. It’s the place where people go to play and to make an epic mess. Currently our rec room has a sewing table (mine), craft table (my daughter’s), craft materials in large numbers of bags on the floor (my daughter’s), a television set, two bean bag chairs, a zebra-striped stuffed chair, a futon mattress, a miniature trampoline, an entire bag of marbles, and a large assortment of stuffed play food. Did I mention that there is also a full-sized tent set up in the middle of the room? And that the room is fairly small, only a little larger than a child’s bedroom?
Now, I am usually all for pitching and recycling and cleaning our spaces until they are almost – but not quite – at the level of my neighbor’s beautiful and simple living space. Every time I walk into the rec room I feel overwhelmed. So here is my new strategy: I am going to ignore it. Instead of feeling stressed out every time the tent goes up in the middle of the rec room and the marbles start bouncing onto the floor from the mini trampoline, I will take a deep breath and move out of the room to pitch and clean somewhere else. I will remember that I have a preschooler and that preschool-aged children make messes, and that as long as the mess isn’t hurting anyone, it is awfully nice to have one place that your mother doesn’t nag you to clean up.
Until next week, that is.