When I say it's a summer party, I mean it both literally and figuratively! (Keep reading and you'll find my $70 therapy session below.)
We here in The Homemaker's homestead have been on the move the majority of the summer. I was thinking the other day (no comments about this statement, just step away from the obvious door I just opened) and realized that our family has never been OOT (out of town, for you acronym-challenged) so much in a summer/in a year/in our lives... EVER! Honestly, we have had a summer that has been filled with so much that for the first time I can say we all will kick off the new school year with a renewed sense of appreciation for BEING HOME.
With that said, LET'S HAVE A PARTY! Let's everyone host a summer party - near and far - so that we can say we partied together!
Now that the Scrapuccino Room is in order, with a place for everything and everything in its' place, I was able to start creating again. The artist in me really took over - yes, I said it, THE ARTIST - and I created a set of banners that I'm selling over at my facebook store. I'll be taking custom orders, too, for names (yes, they are quality for home decor), "baby", "welcome home", "home", "happy birthday", etc.
I have turned and turned and turned around to try to find my voice here at my blog. It's funny - I feed off of the reactions of my friends and without them in front of me, I sturggle - oops, struggle. Well, no, sturggle really is a good word! Word. I am so random that I see myself run out of stuff to say without conversation going on with me, around me. And then God helps me out with some distraction... The phone just rang. As I walked back to the computer with my warmed coffee cup in hand I passed by the front window (oh so sorry to the neighbors for the "vision of loveliness") and see my beautiful fountain that brings us such calm. When I redecorated the house a couple months back I went with a denim blue and sandy tan color scheme with distressed white and chocolate brown accents and paired down the decades and generations of nic-nacs to foster a sense of beach cottage calm, with an emphasis of CALM. As I hit the Scrapuccino Room doorway, the voice of my girl saying "our house is so boring now, so sterile" rings through my head and my heart hurts.
I've struggled with family hoarding issues my entire life. Just within the last year I overheard my mom say to her sister that I am not sentimental because I don't save mementos. Dude, I'm a scrapbooker for Jiminy Cricket's sake! NOT SENTIMENTAL? I think she could have taken a dull, rusty wood lathe and ran it across my bare elbow and it would have been less painful. (is that a visual or what?) I think my soul actually shrank a smidge after hearing her say those words. When we lived in New York we had a full, partially-finished basement. It was about 600 square feet. It had a maze, like a Habitrail (hamster home), through the entire space of Rubbermaid bins stacked 5-6 bins high all through the area. I am not exaggerating when I say that every single wall in the entire home was COVERED in pictures, collectibles, antiques, plaques, tractor seats, step ladders, BB guns, straw hats... you are seeing this in your mind's eye now, aren't you? Then when we moved back to CA the collections FOLLOWED US and thus, every wall in the house began, right outta the gates, COVERED - including my mom's collection of 9 (paired down from 11 by attrition) indoor cats. We bought a 4 bedroom home so the cats would have their own. The cats are truly another blog by themselves. I'll just get back to the "collectibles" and my lack of sentiment. We had 30-40 bins of JUST CHRISTMAS decorations and several for each other holiday in the year. Organized? YES. We were labeled and listed, like-items gathered... and yet I was taught to continue to buy. The last 3 years have found me searching and sifting and stressing over all the STUFF we had (very important word, had) that was going to hay in a handbasket, wrapped neatly in recycled tissue paper from every gift bag we'd ever received, in bin after bin after bin. It was ludicrous. So I started sorting. Which led to mutiny in my home. But little by little, piece by piece, I have photographed and scanned item by item that truly was memorable. Each memory flooding my heart but knowing that someone will appreciate this treasure and give it life again outside of the Rubbermaid existence it had been living.
Slowly I have found that I have been teaching my girl the same thing I had been taught - treasure things. I want to teach my girl to treasure moments. We have so few.
Yes, there are 2,366,820,000 seconds in a 75 year old life.
How many of them are MOMENTS?
I don't want my girl's view of life's MOMENTS impeded by life's THINGS. I suppose I'm just trying to rationalize that the "sterile" home now will mean a future of LIVING LIFE MOMENTS in her future.
