(IM)Perfectly Beautiful

A fun girl is doing a fun thing on her blog today. Actually, she did it yesterday, but because I'm so imperfect, I'm a day late in joining the fun. She asked us to post photos of exactly how imperfect our houses can look, just to prove that we are all keeping it real on a day to day basis. I am profoundly overqualified when it comes to imperfections.


Oh, the choices. A photo of any single room in my house today would be an ample candidate for this particular post! Here goes...


It is absolutely necessary for me, at any given moment, to have clean kitchen counters. The rest of the house can be (and usually is) piled with clutter, but if I can relocate the piles off the kitchen counters to any available floor, shelf, or closet space I can usually fool myself into feeling like the house is "tidy". Uh, not today.


Second to my dire need for counter orderliness is an entryway that you can, well, enter. The footwear fashion is on permanent display. Everyday. See the shoe basket?? It's that empty thing there in the corner. Even the cat looks perturbed. And we were apparently in some pressing rush to get the baby out of her chair last night. I'm thinking about making "barefoot" part of our family dress code.


So, there it is. I enjoyed visiting other blogs to see their imperfections. I think the resounding theme for those of us who participated was that it is the imperfections that prove we live here, loving together and making memories, and those are the things that make an imperfect house a beautiful home!!

My Favorite Room

Kelly is doing a fun thing on her blog. She asked people to share pictures of their favorite rooms. I always love to see the insides of other homes, so I decided to play along with her. My favorite room in our home is the den. I think I like it best because that is where we spend all our time, so I have many happy memories there.

I love the painting of the big red barn that hangs over our fireplace. We are city folk, but we long to be out in the country someday, and to have a big red barn that could house our rag tag team of pets and strays. Several years ago, we went to the furniture store to buy a new couch. We saw this painting long before we reached the sofa department. The store was hosting a special event that day, and the artist was hand signing paintings. So, we acted on impulse (not like us at all), blew our whole couch budget, and then came home to sit on the floor and admire the new signed painting!

There is a little wooden stool next to the fireplace that currently holds a birdhouse. My father made that stool in shop class when he was a boy.

The quilt on my wall was made by my Oma's best friend. She was nearly 90 when she hand quilted it with tiny, perfect stitches. My Oma had it on a bed in her house, hidden by another quilt, and one time when I went to visit her I commented on how pretty it was. When I got ready to leave, she had it carefully wrapped in a bundle to send with me as a surprise. That same year, my father-in-law drew my name at Christmastime, and he bought me this beautiful quilt rack.

The little hand painted chair on the floor was a baby gift from a sweet friend of mine. That chair has been in her family for a long time. Her husband fixed it up, and she had it freshly painted for Emma.

I have a china hutch in my den filled with my Great Grandmother's antique dishes. My Grandmother used those dishes the whole time I was growing up, and I remember her drinking tea with honey from those little teacups.

The very sophisticated white plastic drawers next to the hutch house our extensive Lego collection. I bought those drawers one day when I was delirious. I spent hours picking through Legos and sorting them out by color. One color per drawer.

Worst. Idea. Ever.

Did you know that little boys don't disassemble creations and refile Legos by color? In fact, they don't often disassemble at all, which is why most of the baskets you see scattered around the room are actually overflow receptacles for super-sonic spaceships and ultra-mega shooting aircraft.
The plate rack with blue plates was a gift from my husband one year, and the sign above it is what I stare at when I lay on the couch to read to my kids. Good reminder. :)


Old Faithful there was following me around, doing her best to obstruct every shot. She is a sweet old hound, and since she is a permanent snoozing feature of the den, I figured she deserved a little press.

The pretty clock above the red chair was a wedding present from my husband's folks. The red chair holds a few of my rooster pillows, because I am a firm believer that you can NEVER have too many needlepoint rooster pillows.

...And that is a tour of my favorite room in the house.

Cowboy Country

Max has a passion for horses and the rodeo. Hayden likes horses too, and also loves John Deere tractors. I tried to create a bedroom for them that represented both their interests. I wanted some shelves where they could display trophies, keep some favorite books, and also have a stereo. They love listening to books on tape and Adventures In Odyssey, and in summertime they fall asleep listening to baseball games. Hannah passed along her old stereo when she graduated to an ipod docking station. (There are some benefits to having an older sister after all.) I was pleased to find these black shelves on clearance at a supercenter.

The freshly painted walls and new shelves propelled me into an organizing frenzy. Summer clothes are stacked neatly in drawers, waiting for someone to yank a shirt out from the bottom of the stack. Shoes are tucked away in new shoe pockets, waiting to be drug downstairs and left by the front door. Toys, flashlights, and nerf guns are categorized into baskets, awaiting the inevitable jumbling. Winter blankets are freshly laundered and neatly folded, waiting to be unfolded and used to build forts in the clean closet. Ranch hands, after all, do grow restless.

My favorite thing about the boys' room is their beds. Their Papa built those beds out of wood from an old barn on their property. Papa planed and sanded and stained that wood to perfection. Then he shopped the flea market for just the right iron accents. I hope little boys in our family for generations to come will enjoy those beds, because they were a special labor of love.

I also like the flag on the ceiling which I painted one day when I was feeling Michaelangeloish.

Cleaning, organizing, and decorating a B.O.Y. room is a task that all mothers succumb to at some point or another. It's that little streak of optimism that God gifts to mothers...the one that says maybe, just maybe we have finally stumbled upon "THE" system. You know, the one that the boys not only appreciate, but also pledge to live by faithfully, day in and day out.

"Oh look! My toys are organized. I think I'll put them back this way when I am done playing because it makes it so much easier to find what I am looking for!"

"My clothes! My clothes! Neatly hanging so they don't wrinkle. How hard can hangers be? I think I'll give them a try!"

"Books! On a shelf! Oooohhhh....now I get it.....that's why they call it a bookshelf!"

Hope does spring eternal here in Cowboy Country.

Keeping of the Grounds

Betty Crocker called. Wants her calories back.

Whenever I bake something irresistible, I sneak into the pan and straighten the edges. All day long. I printed a chocolate cake recipe from Pioneer Woman's blog and made it for Mother's Day. Her blog says it is so good it will make you "wig out". That's a weird expression that I had never heard before. What is wigging out? And am I allowed to do that if I'm a baptist? :) I took my first bite of this cake, and I'm pretty sure I wigged. It's that good. I enjoyed a respectable piece on Mother's Day, and ever since have been slicing long, skinny strips which, all added together, total an inappropriately sized mound of chocolaty deliciousness. I tidy one corner, then an edge, then back to the corner to neatly trim. By late yesterday afternoon my sink looked like this....

Four knives (pointed little daggers piercing my guilty conscience) stacked up as a sharp reminder that I had misbehaved four times by 4:30. Sigh. It's better to just leave one knife in the pan.

It's mid-May, which means it's time to get the yard in shape for summer. My goal for the week is to do at least one thing in the yard every day, so I've declared this Grounds Keeping week. Due to my overall lack of enthusiasm for yard work, I chose a very simple project to ease in gently. No use getting too productive too quickly. Our shed needed some spiffing up.

I never thought I'd become "that girl"...the one who "plants" plastic flowers in her yard. But, the reality of my life lies somewhere between really wanting to water all the flowers and actually getting around to watering all the flowers. So, if the sprinkler system can't reach it, it needs to be drought tolerant. Or plastic. While purusing the fake flower isle like a pseudo-gardener, I stumbled upon these cute little garden picks on clearance for only fifty cents. Aren't they cute?

The birds were white when I bought them, but I decided they didn't show up too well, so I brought them in and rubbed on some blue paint on them with a paper towel. Now they are just right. I have three loads of laundry dumped on the foot of my bed, I haven't graded math, and so far left-over chocolate cake is the only thing on the dinner menu. But thank goodness I got those birds painted. The plastic flowers would be so lonely without them.

Our gangly, twisted garden hose drives me crazy. It is always snaked along the ground in a disorderly fashion, and no matter how we try to neatly coil it in the corner, it always seems to escape the flower bed and spill haphazardly onto the patio. So, I took my smart self to Home Depot yesterday and got a hose house. I intended to make my man right proud by getting it set up before he got home from work, but the confusing directions caused me to head inside and start straightening some edges! Manor Man handled the assembly, and now my tidy little hose house sits near my spiffy little shed. Not that I actually need to use the hose to water my shed flowers, but if I did, I could. It's all as neat and straight as my cake pan.

Pioneer Woman's Chocolate Sheet Cake

Combine in a mixing bowl:

2 cups flour

2 cups sugar

1/4 t. salt

In a pan, melt:

2 sticks butter

Add 4 heaping tablespoons cocoa. Stir.

Add 1 cup boiling water, allow mixture to boil 30 seconds, then turn off heat.

Pour over flour mixture, and stir to lightly cool.

In a measuring cup, mix:

1/2 cup buttermilk

2 beaten eggs

1 t. baking soda

1 t. vanilla

Stir into chocolate mixture and mix well.

Pour into sheet cake pan and bake at 350 for 20 minutes.

While cake is baking, make the icing.

Melt 1 and 3/4 sticks butter in a pan.

Add 4 heaping tablespoons cocoa, stir to combine, then turn off heat.

Add:

6 T. milk

1 t. vanilla

1 pound minus 1/2 cup powdered sugar - a strange amount but it works

Stir together and add 1/2 cup finely chopped pecans, if desired.

Pour frosting over warm cake.

I highly recommend this with a batch of homemade vanilla ice cream.

My Favorite Spaces

Don't you just love a good list of "favorites"? I thought I'd share a few of my favorite spaces with you. These are the places I fritter...

Fully stocked canisters and a Kitchen Wonder Machine. Check, check! I love to cook and bake, and this is where I bungle about three out of every five recipes I try. I cook for picky eaters, so my culinary creativity is greeted with minimal applause, but I have fun trying anyway.

This morning I tried making homemade granola. This is some serious snack food, and I've been munching away at it all day. In fact, I think I'll move my stretchy jeans to the front of the closet this week, just in case. This granola is so good that I'm thinking about becoming a fabled "granola eater". I could go barefoot and have lots of kids and homeschool. Oh wait......hmmmm........

We have a big, comfy couch that we all like to pile into to watch movies or do read alouds. This is the coveted corner spot. We all dive headlong toward the couch in hopes of capturing what is truly the best seat in the house. Sometimes I win the spot, because being a Mom trumps being a kid. But sometimes I lose out, because young, spry, quick legs trump old, slow, crickity legs.

Now this chair is all mine. Well, mine and Emma's. This was my birthday gift before the baby was born. Someday this will go in the nursery, but for now it is in my room and the two of us sit here every few hours to nurse. And smile. And coo. And talk. Sometimes things get left undone so I can rock in this chair, but it doesn't bother me so much. I wish I would have rocked the first three more. This is one of the baby quilts I made for Emma. A homemade quilt and a rocking chair. Isn't that a recipe for a perfect few minutes??

This is where I come to support my new habit. It's thrilling. I'm on the very verge of a "Blogging is Beautiful" bumper sticker. I promise I am. See the furry foot warmer waiting for me? That's Mindy, my King Charles Spaniel.

The laundry room and gardening shed are notably absent from my favorites list. Those are places I most definitely do not heart. How about you? Where is your favorite space??