The Clutter of Life

If you could see this full picture,
you would see that she's
covered with black beans
from below her chin to
the top of her fuzzy little head!

The house is partially decorated for fall with the summer things sitting alongside until they get put away. The floors are littered with cardboard books, dolls & stuffed animals. A Pack N Play sits in the great room & serves as a huge toy box. It can no longer HOLD our little climber! The kitchen sink is full - as is the counter beside it. The laundry room has 2 loads of clean clothes waiting on the top of the dryer to be folded. The dryer holds one more load which will come out when there's a place for it. There are NO LESS THAN 150 oil & acrylic paintings leaning against walls in practically EVERY room of the house. (That's another story there!) And, let's not even talk about the Christmas tree topper
which is still politely sitting in the corner of the dining room. (Should I be feeling guilty that I'm sitting under cozy blankets watching football while I write this post?)

Our lives are FULL lately... in a good way sometimes & in a not-so-good way other times. I was gone for 8 weeks this past summer in Chautauqua, NY. And, the house & yard suffered a bit. (Although, I must admit... the LOML did a great job of keeping the house from being horrible when I returned from the time away.) Since getting home in mid-August the days & weeks have flown by. We've gone to South Carolina for a 3-day weekend & a baseball tournament. We've gone to an Indiana State Park for a little family get-away. We've gone to Ohio a few times to visit my sister who lives there AND our son, his fiance & friends at UC-CCM. And, then there's just normal life when we aren't gone. 

Calling this house home currently: me & my husband (he's the LOML) ...  our daughter & her daughter (21 months old) ... the cat, James Solomon aka Sollie ... too many spiders & possibly 2-12 field mice, as the fields behind us were just harvested this week! 

There's never a dull moment around these parts! And, we're buried in CLUTTER lately. We've experience some crazy twists & turns in our world in the past few months -- the past few years, actually. We've faced some pretty big changes & challenges. And, although I strove to be a perfectionist in my younger days, imperfection has proven to be my forte! 

If I've learned one thing in this crazy dance called life it's that... 

When we focus on

the imperfections

the twists & turns

the clutter of life...

We miss out on the

BEAUTY OF LIFE! 

In the words of Elsa in Frozen... LET IT GO friends :) Take your focus away from the clutter of life & see the beauty.

Linked with the Nesting Place community through the write31days challenge, October 2014 - post No 6.