my husband and i once considered buying a house with such an open floor plan that the kitchen could be seen from almost every room of the downstairs. we both loved this house (as long as we were not the ones living in it).

we know ourselves. making kitchen messes is a skill we’ve been honing for almost 12 years now. cleaning them up is not. but, as evidenced by today’s reality project  submission from tiffany, we are not alone.

tiffany writes:

what you see below is proof that we cook a lot but that we get in and out of the kitchen as quickly as humanly possible. that means that you’ll find food debris pretty much everywhere. we make the food and almost always neglect the clean up part. we can’t even be bothered to close the pantry doors!

tiffany continues:

this scene had about 36 hours more of a mess added to it before it got cleaned. that’s our reality. for us, there’s no time or energy left to clean after cooking. i imagine the kitchen cleaner at the front of the shot saying, “not dirty enough to challenge me. pile some more on before you call for my services!”

thank you , tiffany. and are those hubcaps above your stove? very cool.

elise was completely unimpressed last week with my reality project submission entitled bowl of big-boy-pants .

i have to admit that it pales in comparison with her composition of a similar nature:

what with the pez dispenser, the pin cushion, the golf glove, the classic novel, and the dog shit bag, there is really no contest. and hey — is that crystal?

perhaps i can redeem myself in the kitchen avalanche category. we moved into our current home in september of 2008, and by early october, this stalagmite had formed from concentrated amounts of bibs, dish towels, and compact disks, as well as common kitchen items such as floaties, soccer trophies, and elastic.

i will be devastated if anyone attempts to straighten this area. i know exactly where everything is right now.

keep ’em coming folks!

what do the following items have in common?

• sunscreen
• vision board
• coat hangers
• electric mixer
• bruce pearl bobble head
• diorama of john craig’s fort
• bug spray
• race car
• basket of lavender

they all live in the above-pictured laundry room of andrea and evoke the following questions:

1. where is the laundry in this supposed laundry room?
2. did your vision board include the firing of bruce pearl?
3. do you make your own lavender-scented bugspray and sunscreen using your upright mixer? if not, you should (in all of your spare time).

happy weekend, folks! make many messes. take pictures of them. then leave them behind and have fun. the reality project is depending on you.

the reality project continues, thanks to these pics from sharon in PA. the first introduces a prime breeding ground for chaos and shame: putting one’s house on the market to sell. let’s get a show of hands for all of those who have shoved a dress-up-purse full of baby bottle attachments and kids’ shoes into the oven right as the realtor and prospective buyers were pulling into the driveway. don’t look so smug. those of you who filled the trunks of your cars with this stuff are not much better. but i digress.

sharon writes,

when we were getting ready to move, we cleaned all the clutter off the fridge. i really liked how it looked and decided to keep the fridge in the new house clutter free. right.

of course, the upside about moving (once you finally trick a buyer into purchasing your old digs) is that packing presents a wonderful opportunity to purge your life of things including but not limited to:

• the heart-shaped crystal plate received 12 years ago as a wedding gift
• the baja hoodie you wore in eighth grade
• the dead battery collection accumulating in the sideboard drawer

but oh, how quickly the crap re-accumulates in the new house! behold this disaster atop the dresser of sharon’s ten-year-old.

sharon wants us to know that “the dresser knob on the left has not been hit by an engorgement charm. it just has a scrunchy wrapped around it, as do four of the five other knobs.”

thanks, sharon, for reminding me that i never want to move again. and p.s. i would give five scrunchies for a fridge that looks as orderly as yours does!

if you are reading this on break from ironing your underwear and fine-cleaning your bathroom tile grout, chances are, you could benefit from a lesson about the evolution and breeding habits of clutter.

thanks to gretchen‘s sophisticated time-lapse photography (read: two passing smart-phone shots), today’s reality project  post features two images of the same space.

kitchen -- SUNDAY

kitchen -- MONDAY

gretchen writes,

you know how sometimes you look around your house and think, “wow!  this place is a disaster – could it BE any more disgusting? i have to clean it up TODAY.” but then life gets in the way. let’s face it, when is cleaning up the constantly recurring mess more fun than spending time with your child, going to a concert, or just sitting down with a glass of wine because you are only one woman and you are tired at the end of the day? then when you look again 12 hours later (or so) you think, “hmm, apparently yes it COULD be more of a disaster.”

that is what this picture shows.

thank you, gretchen, for reminding us that just as rome wasn’t built in a day, neither are our colossal messes. you did the right thing in this situation. i hope you played with your kid, went to a concert, and had threeglasses of wine, all while sitting down! plus, as evidenced by monday’s shot, cleaning products can actually contribute to the clutter. we could all learn a lesson from you about priorities. 

speaking of priorities, read here about my friend susan, whose commitment to order involves a card catalog in her living room. but since she became a mother 19 months ago, her “chaos has quintupled.” we might all do well to take her advice:

nobody ever died from a messy coffee table.

though one could argue that this whole blog is simply one continuous excavation of my own personal motherhood mess, i am feeling the need to contribute a scene from my own life to the reality project. but first, i want to send out a big thank you to those who have shared images with me in the name of truth-telling. keep ’em coming!

today’s still life was mindlessly constructed for purely practical reasons. last wednesday, instead of packing a bag to send with the bird to my mother’s house, i stuck the day’s necessities in her large clear salad bowl — an item i had borrowed and needed to return.

did i mention that last wednesday was day two of the bird’s potty training regimen? i filled the bowl with the kid’s “chew toy,” a handful of big-boy-pants, and a quarter of a homemade chocolate cake (to make me seem less mean for putting my mom through potty training hell). i was on my way to the car with this collection when it occurred to me how funny it was!

possible titles:

• foreshadowing (the bird pooped in his pants at my mom’s)
• silly salad (my mom’s grandmother name is silly sally)
• life is just a bowl of big-boy-pants

my friend maryann has expanded the scope of the reality project on her blog, the blue room. check out her version of truth-telling, complete with this hilarious last line:

and anyone commenting that they have it all together, or recoiling in self-righteous horror, will be pelted by the alphabet magnets on my fridge that go with a leapfrog game that disappeared five years ago.

i once heard a mother describe her minivan as “a disaster preparedness kit on wheels.” hilarious! my car is really more like a snack truck that swallowed a briefcase that swallowed a sporting goods store.

it puzzles me that today’s reality project  submission is the first one that involves a vehicle.

the picture below is from erica, who assures us that this is the most organized view of her car. she writes, “it almost looks pretty. no one should be deceived into thinking that my other spaces ever look this organized! the back seat truly needed to be shoveled out to get rid of food wrappers, kids’ shoes, baby blankets and other random crap. the front passenger side is no better.”

thanks for the shovel idea, erica. i’m going to try that in my back seat.

the beauty of this mess is that every aspect of erica’s life (with the exception of her husband) is represented.

“from the left: the lovely colorful cooler that transports milk for my baby boy on days when i’m at work and he’s at daycare; underneath it, the ancient breast pump that i received as a hand-me-down and may well be on it’s third or fourth baby; my blue camera case, necessary for a pivotal day in my daughter’s life; my fancy bike messenger bag with official work-related things sticking out, like books, files, pens, notebooks, and my laptop; one of my daughter’s rain boots peeking out from underneath; a pile of children’s books needed for a meeting with a fellow pastor so that we could use them to write a up a summer sunday school curriculum; underneath that pile, a plastic crate filled with all the little bits and pieces that were in my daughter’s preschool cubby; and poking out of the top of that pile, a bug catching-net that was an end-of-the-year gift from my daughter’s preschool teachers.”

thank you, erica, for taking reality on the road. and happy bug-catching!

about 3.4 times per day, i take in the cluttered chaos of our home and say to myself, “man, this place is a shit hole!” the national average for mothers is actually quite a bit higher (ten times per day). sometimes it pays to have a high tolerance for filth.

but no matter how often i am affected by domestic dissaray (actual DSMIV term?), it always comes with a sense of personal failure. rarely do i remember that this place is a fraternity house and that the odds are stacked against me. seldom does it occur to me that finding time to scrape the kids’ sticker art from the kitchen floor would mean neglecting some other responsibility or necessity, such as showing up at work or sleeping.

this is why i think my generation can greatly add to the flow of women’s progress simply by telling the truth. even the tidiest among us have at least one little corner where stuff from every category of life  is thrown together like new yorkers on the subway. life is moving along too quickly to stop and sort everything out. but if we pause long enough to voice our realities, the sense of personal failure might give way to the obvious collective notion that no single person can effectively accomplish the zillion tasks that are set before modern mothers.

today’s contribution to the reality project comes from elise, who gazes upon this scene daily from her perch at the computer.

there are boxes to break down for recycling, an old microwave to dispose of, grocery bags to return to the car, and a rogue cat carrier standing on end next to it all. there are “storage” areas just like this in nurturing homes all across the country, each of them taunting us with ridiculous standards and tiresome to-dos.

i am finding that nothing combats a sense of personal failure like a sense of humor. to all the folks who are willing to unveil their messes as part of the reality project, thank you. at the very least, these scenes make us laugh (there’s no cat in the carrier, right?). at the most, they just might help us learn to stop making society’s failures our own.

sharon sent me this piece, which i am titling:

• breakfast of champions,
• who has time to clear the dishes?, or
• the goofball pulls an all-nighter.

now let’s take a little trip to the master bathroom, home to this scene i’m going to call:

• walgreens stock truck crashes into east memphis home,
• step one – chug wine. step two – remove panties. step three – apply hair removal system, or
• east(ern medicine) meets west(ern medicine).

for those of you who are playing along at home, the two most recent submissions to the reality project  have involved stray skivvies. what can i say? it’s modern motherhood. not everything has its place.

perhaps the funniest thing about this recent submission to the reality project  is that it came with no accompanying explanation:

 i will now offer you the only plausible rationalization for natalie’s edgy little menagerie :

an oafish teenager, trapped in a middle-aged man’s body, was robbing a florida grocery store in search of the perfect tv dinner. witnesses say he was wearing a tan shirt bearing the image of a muskrat and holding a brown plaid umbrella, while peering at the contents of the store freezer through a paper towel roll scope. the suspect proceeded to a nearby beach-side condo to charge his phone, drink a beer, change into a green shirt, deodorize, and microwave his lunch. when the unsuspecting renters returned to the condo to reapply sunscreen and suction out their 8-month-old’s nostrils, they came face-to-face with the bandit. they put a pot of water on to boil and were discussing the best way to season thief stew when the suspect fled the scene.

typical case of arrested development.