Let them Play.

Ok, not everyone will be able to handle these images

so I'm giving you fair warning. If you a a minimalist/design/organizational freak/genius

 you might want to leave now. These images may

 be disturbing for you and, once seen, you can't 'un-see' them.

 OK? I am showing you a very messy part of my house.

So go, if you have to.

This post is here to serve as a reminder for myself,

 and other mums like me, over the school holiday (and any other time, really).

You see, I am a messy person by my very nature.

I am a wanna-be organized person.

But I'm very, very not.

And I have a great fear of passing the messy/unorganized/clutter gene on to my kids. So this often sees me getting really uptight when they're not listening, and they're not putting their stuff away.

You know, the yelling kind of uptight.

Where you yell really productive stuff at them like

"You never listen to me!"

&

"Put your stuff away!"

oh,

&

my favourite
 {apparently}

"HOW MANY TIMES DO I HAVE TO TELL YOU?!!"

Has pretty much a 100% failure rate in my experience.

Oh, and if you're reading this thinking that I actually

 have a solution for any of this then I am so sorry, I totally do not.

Like I said this is to serve as a reminder for myself,

 and maybe a sort of community service announcement.

An announcement that just says sometimes you've

 just got to let it go.

Let. It. Go.

When I stand in my kitchen doing the dishes, which

 seems to be an awful lot of the time, this is what I see when

 I turn left. It's the kids space.

There are hula hoops hanging from the ceiling,

 two little desks at the window, two little chairs which belong somewhere else entirely, a cupboard which holds

 arty- farty stuff for little arty-fartsters.

As you can see, there is also a truck-load of other assorted crap.

So as we get closer, you can see more and more 'stuff'.

Like the football socks hanging over the back of the old genoa lounge chair, which also has some kind of artwork/random

 piece of paper {?} sticky-taped to the back of it.

There are scissors on the arm of the chair also.
I don't know if you'll be able to see them
but trust me, they're there.

Because, sadly, my children suffer from domestic deafness

 {I know, so awful, probably something I ate while I was pregnant}

 and apparently didn't hear me the first 50 times I explained my reasons for wanting the scissors returned to their spot.

Here's an elevated view for you.

Note my curtains which need to be shortened as they are just too long to be there where the desks are, but I have chosen, instead, to just, kind of, knot them up like that.

Nice.

My kids love cupboards because you can just

 open those doors up and pull all that stuff out!!

Closing cupboard doors is completely optional and not practiced.

They're playing some kind of version of 'snap' here, using, ahem, old scrapbooking supplies of some sort, I believe.

I can't be too sure because I was far more focused on the fact that they were doing something together and not fighting for such an extended period of time. A good ten minutes, I think.

Not long after I took the picture below it degenerated back to normal........grizzling and the throwing around of kid swear words such as dumb head, and idiot.

Anyway. My point is that while we would all love to have immaculate, organized, designer homes that are always tidy and never ever messy, it's not always realistic and we need to remind ourselves of that every now and then.

If your kids are doin' ok, and they're happy,

 then give yourself a break.

Because all that crap on the floor is still going to be there tomorrow, whether it gets picked up now or not.

It'll be back.

Now, of course I'm not saying it's ok to let it all go and let your home turn into some kind of rodent filled hovel,
but sometimes,
just try,
to not stress about the mess.

Look at the bigger picture
 and see what you've really got in front of you.