Recently I took part in a facebook challenge to post black and white pictures of my life for 7 days, no people, no exceptions. I didn’t realize how hard it was to not take pictures of people – particularly my kids. I even asked the friend who challenged me, “Do the kids count as people?” How can I showcase my life without them in it? As I scrolled through my facebook, I saw others had the same problem. Post after post I saw black and white pics of people’s kids or grandparents, I could only laugh. Realizing I wasn’t alone, I began my challenge.

After Day 6, I was done. My sad attempts at being artistic were just that, sad. I truly struggled with not taking pics of the kids. Well, to be honest, I did take pics of the kids and then caught myself before I posted them for the challenge. Though their essence was in a few pictures, I came to realize just how boring my life is without them. I want to show them off because they are the best things in my world. Even when my 1yo son has been crying for an hour straight over nothing.

One thing the challenge reinforced is that my life is filled with messy spaces. Literally, everywhere I look there’s a mess, including inside myself. But, I’m working on accepting all messes. It’s not so easy. I won’t give up on trying to get things in order, but instead of feeling bad about it, I can accept that life isn’t perfect. Life isn’t black & white. It’s filled with grey areas. The grey areas, though sometimes stressful, is what makes life beautiful.

With that said, I leave you now to go sweep the floor for the 5^th time today… and it’s only 11:30am.