Behind the Perfection....

   Ah!  The first day of school 2014.  It's just after Labor Day, I've got a baby due a month later, and yet I still manage to get the perfect picture of my boys on their first day of school.  They were excited, they were getting along great, it was the perfect morning, or was it?

   It was misting rain, though you can't see that in the photo.  This was Malachi's second shirt of the day, it's on inside out and backwards.  The grass desperately needed to be cut.  We took our photos outside because inside was a mess.  YES!  I said it!  On our very first day of school I was not ready and our house was far from ready.  I still had 4 kids and everyone knows that the 4th is the one that pushes you over the edge to just giving up.  Thankfully the 5th throws you back up there because you realize that without organization, life will completely fall apart.  I've now learned that the 6th just takes all of those stereotypes, sticks them in a blender and serves up a nice concoction of order, organization and complete disarray all within the same day, sometimes within the same hour.

  

See what I mean, this was just a few minutes before the perfectly cute photo above.  

 This is what my office looked like as we started our school work that day.  

And the living room was a mess too.  

 

 

 

These are the photos leading up to the perfect one above.  They wouldn't cooperate with pictures at all.  

See the tall grass?  

The crazy antics continued.

 My vanilla latte was well earned!  

 Told you that shirt was inside out and backwards.

 Oh, yeah!  The rain meant Gabe was home from work that day too.  Notice my boys are "helping" read blueprints instead of doing the school work I had planned for them?

 

Notice I'm a hot mess!  My hair probably hadn't been washed in days, my shirt was snug because of my huge baby belly, and my yoga pants were covered in paint.

   So why would I share this?  To encourage you.  To remind you that there's always something behind those perfect photos.  None of us have it all together, some just know how to hide it better than others.  Some of us just don't care anymore.  We'll show our ugly to the world and remind ourselves to see this as a beautiful mess.  This mess means there is life inside the walls of our home.  Those grins on my boys' faces mean that despite the mess, there is laughter and love inside our home.  All the interruptions give us a chance to embrace challenges and disruptions and learn how to cope with them so that when these kids are adults, every little change in plans won't cause panic.  

  Homeschooling is hard work.  Raising kids is hard work.  On those days when you think you are the only one drowning in chaos, please remember that no one has it all together.  There's always something messy behind the perfection.