Trying to balance

I tend to rosy things up.  I don't share the bad things until they are REALLY bad and then they hit out of nowhere.  Like this neighborhood.  There are things about it I really like and will always like.  There are things about it I don't like, and never will.  There are people here I absolutely adore and people here I am actually scared of.  I don't like that I spend time and money to make my steps the cutest steps on my block and then neighbor kids actually destroy everything, even the wooden decorations that were NAILED DOWN! 

This house is the same.  There are parts of it I like, like the shelves upstairs in the hallway, that I have turned into our little library.  There are parts of I don't like, like the yard (or the lack thereof), the completely lack of storage (although that has forced us to really decided what we need and what we don't) and the fact that the way this house is has forced me to turn a really big kitchen into a cluttered combo unit that serves too many purposes (kitchen, storage, laundry, classroom, play area).

I have figured out why the kitchen is bugging me so much.  In all our other houses, our family was just as prone to messiness as they are here.  I have a big family and it is impossible for me to keep on top of cleaning up behind all of them.  But my kitchen was always my refuge.  It was the one place that was mine and I could keep it as tidy and cute as I wanted.  But here, the kids play there, they do artwork there, everyone is in there ALL THE TIME and instead of it being the tidiest room in a somewhat cluttered house, it is the one that I battle the most. I joke that we have gremlins and every time I leave the kitchen, they messy it up.  I go in and I clean and then I step outside the room.  But when I immediately turn around to go back into the kitchen, the gremlins have already attacked and it is a mess again!  HOW DO THEY DO THAT???

In an effort to share some good even on a bad day, here is the community center downstairs below our unit. The people there are awesome and I adore them and the services they provide.

Here is my wonderful neighbor whom I adore

I love my little pantry.

Here are Princess Belle and Princess Magpie standing in front of the little library I created.

But, this is my block with NO backyard.  This is where the awesome people live. Princess Magpie keeps asking me if we can move to a new house that has a yard with a tree.

This is the corner of my unit.  Down over the back, surrounding that parking lot you can see is where the scary people live, the ones with drugs, bad attitudes, loud music, yelling and guns. 

This is my nicely decorated front step, that I was so proud of:

But the neighborhood kids came along and destroyed, it, broke most of it into pieces, even the wooden ones I nailed down. The rent here is cheap and I LIKE that, Princess Belle has friends and I LIKE that too, but I am just so sad about how my things keep getting destroyed.

And I can't get a picture of my cluttered, messy, too many purposes for one little room, kitchen.  But trust me, it is bad!!