On Home

This former netball champion is happy to live with a little chaos because it’s a messy reminder of her two little miracles.

- Liz Ellis

I am sitting in my living room, surrounded by mess. Glorious, magnificent mess. Balls, dolls, tea sets, tractors, Thomas the Tank Engine and all sixty squillion of his train friends litter the floor. It’s the type of mess that only a two-year-old can make, and only when he is enabled in the pursuit of said mess by his six-year-old sister. It stretches from the living area down the hallway and into the bedrooms of both kids. And you know what? I love that mess.

Actually, it’s not so much the mess itself that I love, but rather the fact that it exists at all. It’s the sort of mess – created by two scheming siblings, currently oscillating between laughing and squabbling in their bedrooms – that I never thought I would have in my home. For me, that mess is not just something that will have to be tidied up later (likely by me, singing “This is how we put the toys away at the end of the daaaaaay…” in an attempt to get a little bit of help from the creators of it), but rather, it is a reminder that life is good and I am happy.