i’m just gunna come right out with it.
and i know people are gunna eat this up…because we all just love imperfection.
i’m gunna be real.
ready?
remember my bedroom?
my bedroom is this perfect haven of a room when it’s clean. the afternoon light comes in this lovely stretch of glass doors and bathes the room with its splendor. and i have a reading nook–a real reading nook–with a table and lamp and the perfect little chair–and by perfect, i mean not-so-perfect because the left arm is a little loose and the seat is a bit squished, but it worked many a night when i used it to nurse lainey in the dark and actually appreciated the little give the left arm had because it would bend just the right amount to support my sleepy recline…without dropping a baby. i love my dresser and the line-up of polished perfume bottles arranged like dominoes on their mirrored tray positioned in perfect symmetry on the dresser between my silver wedding frames. i love the framed picture on my wall that i drew and the shelf that displays my little treasures–the rock from my grandma’s burial, my grandpa’s collage, the shell that was on my pillow the night we got married, lainey’s hospital bracelet… i like the way each of our nightstands says so much about us: brett’s simple and clean with only his watch, a bottle of nasalcrom, a very anassuming alarm clock and a picture of his kids taped over one of me in my wedding dress (it’s okay, i’m over it); mine with a graveyard of pacifiers, a stack of books i’ll never read, an old diary, a glass of water from three nights ago, four pens–three of which don’t work, a handful of hairties (hair included), lainey’s one-year scrapbook (which I look at every single week), and a lone earring.
and then there’s the whole issue of the bed. our bed is just grand, and we have really good cotton sheets and a quilt i love and heaps of down pillows that sandwich your head just right.
together, it makes a very lovely bedroom.
which is why i can’t understand my issues with keeping it clean.
i have a slew of justifications i use to make myself feel better, which include the following: both brett and i have a hard time parting with anything sentimental value can be attached to (and for the record, everything can have sentimental value attached to it), i’d rather do something creative than necessary tasks and often, regretfully, make the choice to do so, i do a phenomenal job of keeping the open areas of the house clean…but the bottom line is, there is no excuse. because having a beautiful bedroom grants me a more beautiful life. i enjoy my room too much to let it get so messy, and i certainly owe it to my hard-working husband.
so, with that said…i’ll get a little honest here.
in the course of my day, if i don’t want to bother with making a decision on where to put odd things, i put them in my bedroom. in addition, i often do laundry, fold it, and then lay it in a pile on my bedroom floor. in addition, i often try three to, oh let’s say seventeen things on before i go out…and sixteen of them may land on the floor.
so, in an intimate moment of friendship, i exposed my mess to a few friends the other night during my party (dede lives across the street)…and it garnered laughter of the unexplainable sort.
i have nothing to hide. we’re talking frat party gone wrong.
so, as intimate moments of friendship often go…my friend heidi says something on the lines of, “dude…i’m coming over this week to help you, and we will have so much fun gettin’ this bedroom back in shape.”
so, today was the day. and it was the most wonderful experience.
confined to the frat-party-gone-wrong, we watched movies. we folded. we hung things. and we did it bird by bird.
and i can’t tell you how many times we were rolling on the floor in fits of hysteric laughter. like, literally, my knees gave out on me once i was laughing so hard. and i hit my head on the nightstand.
the randomness of objects in the heap? i kid you not, this is exactly how it went: folded shirt, folded skirt, folded shirt, attachable cat tail from halloween costume, lone sock, lone sock, a receipt from target. washcloth, tablecloth, dishcloth, crumpled piece of paper scribbled in marker the words “WAKE ME UP” (don’t ask), broken hanger, broken hanger, lone sock, broken hanger (tally stands at nine). and it went on and on.
and our two littles were body-slamming piles of clothes while lily played with socks and we talked and laughed and folded and laughed.
and tonight, several hours and many beautiful vacuum lines later, it was clean.
which simply deserved a toast. so, we sat in the driveway, watched our littles climb on trikes and bikes, and we celebrated. not so much to a clean room, but to having these kinds of friends…the ones you can safely let in to see all the imperfections…laugh about them…and somewhere in the course of it all, make them better.
my room is clean.
and vacuumed.
and the perfume bottles stand dustless once again.
and it feels…delicious.
my haven has returned.
and i didn’t want to leave it tonight. just wanted to curl up on the bed and enjoy it…so we did.
i love real life…and always getting better, ya know?
i am thirty and most certainly, thirty-year-olds can have very clean bedrooms. and cook. and be really, really great moms. and wives. and take pictures. and write. and document their child’s life. and have friends. and read. and love. love a lot. yes we can.
oh…and throwin’ in lainey’s superbowl attire…
and her everyday loveliness…
she woke up with a runny nose last night and fell back asleep on top of me…just wanted her little body completely embracing mine. and it’s those moments, with her heavy chest pushed right against mine, her hand tucked right under my chin, the wisps of her hair right where i can breathe them in…that i think in the dark how much i’ll want this moment back. and i close my eyes and pretend it’s twenty years from now and i’ve just been granted my wish to go back–just for a moment–and i open my eyes again, as that future me…and i just can’t hug her close enough, can’t breathe in her littleness as much as my heart wants to. and it just hurts to love her.
so there. an honest blog post. an imperfect one. and, best of all…a loving one. ‘cuz you can’t escape without a little love.
i am just glad to know that even the great KH has a “messy place” we all have one… I think you have inspired me to go clean my laundry room!!!!!
There is nothing like the feeling of ordering the chaos in your life…it might be a closet or a laundry roome, it might be a relationship or a personal struggle…but it feels so grand to finally see it all in order. Next, the challenge of keeping it that way. Kudos to you…and send that sweet Heidi and Becks over to help me tackle some corners of chaos here…they would make it fun! Love you oodles of poodles!
The superbowl attire is the bomb!
ohhhhh….I KNOWwwwww! I’m laughing because I’ve given myself A YEAR to get my bedroom clean, and after finishing under the bed and the drawers, I’ve come to a standstill, somehow. It’s better to do it all at once, no? Yes. But I am sooo like you in this respect. Guess I need a girlfriend to come over 🙂 Love the real-ness in this post!
i can’t tell you how many times i walked into the mess, looked at it, contemplated and then decided to do something completely different. and when i do decide to have at it, i get sidetracked…color-coding the closet or repainting the baseboards, or organizing all the photo albums i found under the bed…just looking for ANYTHING to keep me from doing what I don’t want to!!! i called carin several times during the ordeal and she said, “good thing i’m not there because we’d fold one stack of clothes, look at each other and say ‘wanna go to t.j. maxx?’
i loved this post and not because you showed us your flaw (which was pretty funny), but because you showed how much your friends love you. while i was reading my thought was, wow, kelle is so lucky to have such friends. – love the blue toe polish, heidi!
and then the icing, the cherry on the sundae – miss lainey love. i think my favorite pic in this post was the one of her bare feet. oh and the one in the swing – she looks so grown up. i don’t know why, but its very little girl.
1. “imperfection” is a little strong. Something tells me that even in its frat house state, your room is a very FUN place to be!
2. distinct memories floating back of visiting your house as a kid and finding the living areas orderly, neat … but feeling like a kid in a candy store when we got to escape to your’s and Carin’s room… a lips phone here, a talking gorilla there, a few press-on nails stuck to the wall for good measure. Some may say “imperfection,” but to me, it was unbridled fun at its best, even if the only cabbage patch around was made from a nylon! (haha I can laugh at that because my mom made us the same doll and he got a run in his face. Nice going!)
3. I am compelled to comment on this post about “imperfection” for the cathartic excuse to share my own recent bout: so as not to prejudice the involved parties, I will TRY to spare some detail. It goes like this. Boss takes me to lauded mexican place for lunch. I must not refuse Boss’s free lunches. In fact I gorged myself on tortillas and beans. Flash to two hours later and I am delivering a closing argument to a jury. It is silent in the court room… but for my stomach, which was giving me warning noises that uncontrollable flatulence was imminent. Do you have any idea how quiet a room can get when a judge is delivering a verdict? Do you have any idea how loud that little precursor to a fart can sound in such a quiet room? You think it can slip a little bit and no one will notice? Oh they pretend they didn’t notice, but you know they are going home and making you the laughingstock of their dinner table that night.
So, if imperfection provides a little fun some time, bring it on!
Dear Anonymous,
I know who you are.
Bwah ha ha ha ha.
Laughing hard…our purple carpet could only be seen once a year…like christmas eve because my dad made us clean it so that the pictures of us, christmas-jammied in our beds, would look good.
sadly…my carpet in this bedroom too has missed me. but today, it smiles at me.
way to rip one in court.
imperfect things have the ability to show us the perfection that is really in our lives.
friendships, for example …
and i love the example of your side of the room harboring pacifiers and such … mine is a true testament of motherhood too.
on my nightstand … i have baby advil, a sippy cup of water, a picture of the girly-girls, a birth plan (from 2 years ago), tons of books that i actually read (5 years ago), and a whole smattering of papers cut out from magazines with recipes and suggestions on parenting.
but … it’s so me. imperfections and all.
Hello Kelle,
I have been following your blog for a long time and I just love the way you do it . I live down the seashore of the Brazil and I do have a blog, too. God bless you and your beautiful family !!!
Malu
well there are so many reasons , but the nost important one is that my husband is already retired from work and I am an English teacher and translator but we had a dream to live by the sea someday and so…God allowed us to live it, so we are here now.
Today I am celebrating 9 years of wedding anniversary !!
Once again you draw me into your life…your a riot. I love your stories, your thoughts, the way you mother Lainey…your super fun Kelle..wish we lived closer. I’d love to laugh like that with you!
in the superbowl pic, is lainey holding chapstick?
jonah loves chapstick, he sticks his finger in it and digs our large clumps. he doesnt get chapstick too often.
Happy Anniversary, Malu in Brazil. How broad the arms of a blog, to embrace such incredible people so many, many miles away. Now that is perfection!
ha ha ha! ah yes…the chapstick! we go through a lot of chapstick too. and yes, she digs them out in two seconds flat. and she’s very particular about keeping the cap on it. if the cap falls on the floor, she goes into a frenzy looking for it. she likes things together.
just to keep the fun of the world wide blog going, i wanted to chime in and say that gillie, a friend of dig’s in montana, and i go way back and through them i came to your blog and so enjoyed this post, though i must agree with others that as far as imperfection goes, you seem to have done it perfectly. what beautiful photos, lovely girl, sweet, sweet mama. i do the futurama daydream sometimes, too, but i have a little boy that i imagine will one day be a wacky teenager who will want a lot of space from his mama, so i really, really treasure this time when he thinks i am a rockstar! thank you for sharing!
No one is perfect. We all have things that we work on daily. It gives us something to work on.
Those pictures were kind to the stuff.
Just sayin.
You have the most beautiful bedroom around!! It’s like a hotel room from the Hyatt!! The canopy is the best!!
Hope you can get the drawer open that where Heidi delivered twins.
oh my room is always a shit hole. But I know you know that….the reason I made that quilt. Is it working? Kindof. I made my bed this morning but there is definitely a pile of clean/dirty laundry on the floor. But it is hidden so I don’t have to see it right when I walk in. And that is no easy task as my room is about the size of the chicken coop.
Thanks for the new post! xo
…the twins are still stuck and now smell like poop…just sayin’!!!
kell,
SO.
MUCH.
FUN.
my fave find: your black (freshly laundered of course) undies wrapped around beckham’s little hand while saying, “i help mommy, i help mommy.” HA HA HA laugh out freaking loud!
xoxoxo
your room is a beaut!!!!