The Ugly Side of the Classroom

I've been reading this book called "No More Perfect Moms" by Jill Savage which encourages Moms to be real with one another and to dispel the myth that we need to have it all together to be a good mom.

In going along with that I thought I would be totally legit and show you how my homeschool room looked sans cleaning.  Yikes, it's embarrassing and part of my feels crazy showing you this.

My friend Heather came over the other day and our house was trashed.  I mean, horrid, horrid trashed!!  But I bit the bullet and had her over without cleaning anything.  Part of me was mortified.  The other part just tried to laugh it off and explain this is what our life is really like.  She laughed with me and said it made her feel better about her house and made her think that maybe I'm not as perfect as I seem.  I was shocked...me?  perfect!  Ha! 

But apparently I somehow exude that in areas of my life and I don't want to seem that way at all.  I don't want to make other Mama's feel bad about themselves by how I run our home.

So anyway, there's a little background in deciding to show you what is really going on around here...

 junk!  Wow!  A random shoe, clothes for Goodwill, Storage containers, school supplies purchased for this room.  Wow, wow, wow.  This is at the top of the stairs so this has become a veritable dumping grounds over the summer.

 Eek!  A broken plate, a no longer used computer monitor, stacked books, junk, junk, junk!

 A nice cleaned off desk with iced coffee is the calm in the storm I guess.  Yeesh.  The kiddos have been having friends over this summer and they love to play school which has caused most of this.

 Just utter chaos to me.

 This are is our reading corner.  It is tucked behind the stairs in a dormer and the reading corner is just about the only thing this area could be.  I had tried a matress in this area but couldn't find one that fit just right so we had extra blankets folded up there to make a cushion.  It actually worked really well, was comfy and basically was a way to store all of the extra comforters and bedspreads I wasn't using.  Well this summer when the power was our for four days I forgot I had washed Emma's Hello Kitty bedspread and it stayed in the washing machine for 4 days.  Uh, it was so disgusting I had to send it to my Mother in law for remidiation and in the meantime I had to pull this thing apart to find an old purple comforter I had for her to use.  While I was in there I found a long lost duvet cover I had been looking for for Cal's bed.  Anywho, long story short, this is the finishing product of me running up to grab things...now it needs put back together after washing everything.

This may be the saddest part of all...my desk.  Skewed lampshades and empty glasses around pretty much sums it up.  

So this is the long and short of the horrid looking room.  I figured that if I showed you this room 1) you would see if you ever did think I was perfect that you are wrong :)  and 2) this can serve as a sort of incentive for getting it in tip top shape.  :) After I took the pictures we got to cleaning and it is already looking better even.  

I'll be sure to post the after pictures so you can see what it looks like for real.  And if I can ever figure it out I will try to make a video tour of our classroom to show you around a bit...I'd love to show you how I store things and what I have.  I get so many questions about stuff like that so I'll try to figure it out :)