more like this

i'm always always always comparing myself to others.

always.

i notice when the other ladies at the "lady doctor" office have manicured toes and i don't. and when my feet slide into those god-awful stirrups, i wonder if the lady doctor notices the chipped purple nightmares my toenails are.

whether it's post-pregnancy bods or the wrinkles around my eyes spread further, i'm a "compare-a-holic."

blah.

for the past two years or so, i've been madly, totally addicted to the quarterly Artful Blogging. people submit photos of their blogs, their work, and write some words. four times a year, i fork over $15 (i know!) and read about far away places like podunk, idaho where they can walk around their sprawling wrap-around front porches in fluffy white skirts and take pictures of hydrangeas in antiqued metal milk jugs.

perfect shabby-chic worlds that couldn't be further from the houston suburbia boring world i live in, perpetually covered in baby barf and complete with matted hair back under my pony tail. (it's true. shameful, but true.)

i redesign my blog myself when the mood strikes in hopes that maybe someday, i could have some lukewarm essay about how blogging introduced me to a wide world of others (it really hasn't yet) and how my life has forever changed because of blogging and my inherent sense of interior design (it hasn't and i don't have one).

the truth is my world is so far from their world.

so as i peruse yet another perfect shabby-chic world blog on my blog list over there (doubt me? chances are any of those blogs you click on to the right will take you to some awesome tutorial of a quilt i can't sew or a flower i'll never have in a distressed paint can on my $4,000 laura ashley wood table) i figure this artsy take on life will come with time. i'll grow into it as soon as the kids stop drawing with roseart cheap markers on the walls and all four sleep through the night. i'll get to that "artful blogging" stage of life someday. i know it.

but today i sorta laughed out loud after the seventh blog i visited today waxed poetic on the virtues of fresh-cut lilacs and evening sunsets enjoyed in front of an open fire pit on sprawling farmlands. no shit, i say. but what about real life?

i lit a wal-mart lilac candle, used a babywipe to smudge some barf off the carpet, shoved my plastic kid dishes in the dishwasher in all manner of wrong angles and sat down to write about what it really is around here.

more like this.

it's about $7 cheap wine that i buy over and over again even when i have the extra jingle. it's about watching the nba playoffs and NOT some stupid french movie. and it's about kids that don't sleep through the night and dealing with the fact that at one point this week, i may or may not have worn the same t-shirt for two days in a row without realizing it.

and i'm just fine with that.