On holiday from sanity

While you were barbecuing and attending parades, Rick and I celebrated Memorial Day weekend by taking a holiday from our sanity.

We let our daughters set up refrigerator boxes in our living room as “houses”—-boxes that they requested and received for Christmas. Since we neither live in a mansion nor have an “open concept living space,” you can imagine the effect:

It goes without saying that when my children make houses, they feel the need to furnish them and the surrounding area. Hence, the graduation gown on top of one and several scarves sitting with our old friend, painters tape, on another. And, naturally, having fully furnished their houses, the children retired to play on the computer elsewhere. No sense actually enjoying the houses once the decorating  is complete.

Over the course of the weekend, our living room grew in its chaos horror panic-inducing pandemonium decorative touches.

Why stop at decorating inside your cardboard house when you can decorate outside it? Mom’s mantle is the perfect place to hang Grandma’s old scarf with tape. And of course I cannot flourish in life if I don’t have a small horse nearby in a stall of wallpaper books and a hairdryer at the ready.

Good news! One child discovered her inner entrepreneur and set up a hand-lettering enterprise inside her house. She brought a small chair and art supplies into her box, made a menu of lettering styles and demanded business from all the neaby “customers.” Here’s the entrepreneur herself:

And here is a portion of the lettering menu. We may not have order in our home, but we will have bubble lettering, darnitt.

So while the country was honoring the fallen soldiers who have served our nation so sacrificially, Rick and I were mourning our fallen living room.

©Laura Goetsch and Thinking About Such Things, 2016.