Instagram: Where is all their shit?

If I take a half decent shot of my kid or my house, I do like to put it on Instagram.  Let’s just get that out there right now.  I am especially partial to doing this when the shot makes my house look tidier and my child looks more adorable than they really are (this is a bit of a stretch as G is completely adorable).  I follow a lot of home decorating style accounts on IG.  I love looking at kids bedrooms.  I mean really love it.  There are so many clever and stylish people out there and endless ideas to be had from these images (oh maybe I could do that with some milk bottles and a cactus!)

I can tidy G’s room so that it looks pretty cute…

But how many times have you looked at these pictures of childhood perfection and muttered to yourself ‘Seriously… where is all their shit?’.  You know they have it.  You can see from the endless shots that these stylists’ kiddies have got more shoes than me. Easily.  And come on where are the toys?  I mean, yes, obviously before I actually had G I wanted him to only play with simple Amish-style wooden toys too. Ha! Since then my house has been infiltrated by every aspect of Pixar and Disney imaginable.  There are more cheap plastic items in my house right now than there are non-plastic items.  If that stuff is carcinogenic then we are in serious trouble.

Sorry Instagram – my life looks more like this!

I am hopelessly drawn to titles like ‘style in small spaces’ or ‘Your storage problems solved!’.  I would love my house to look like those Instagram pictures in real life.  I can tidy G’s room so that it looks pretty cute and actually very photogenic as long as you don’t round the corner and see the mountain of plastic planes, trains and automobiles piled up on one side.  And please don’t even get me started on Octonauts.  Those guys have blown my chances of home beautiful clean out of the water.  After I’ve given G a bath – our beautiful bathroom looks more like a sopping wet garage sale of plastic animals and submarines. Bathrooms on Instagram barely show one toothbrush.  Let alone three toothbrushes with one toothpaste for adults and another for kids.  And how their slimline drawers can contain the cosmetics, medicines, sunscreens and fungal creams necessary for a whole real family I don’t know.  They must have a separate room for these items.

And this is when it’s been tidied. Normally it’s all over the place. For every cool vintage items I bring home from the Tip Shop – there are five shitty plastic friends following in its wake.

Instagram does inspire me to get a bit more organised. I crave the clean lines.  Every now and then I clear off the cluttered mess on my mantelpiece (one of the rare spaces in our house that belongs only to me) and I try and cull.  I try and make it look prettier and less of an eyesore. But I can’t get rid of any of those dust collecting photo frames of my family.  Or the Valentine card I got from Glenn which is so cheesy but make me smile.  Or the tiny cup and saucer Pip gave me at my baby shower.  The photo of my brother and sister and I on a first day at school.  The piles of beaded necklaces and the black feathered mask from a dinner thing I went to with Rosebud.  In the end he only thing I feel comfortable removing from this area is the dust.

One of the few places that is just mine. If I’ve lost something it’s usually here somewhere.

So don’t believe any of the photos I post. Because you can be sure that just out of shot there’s a huge pile of washing, a sink full of dishes and someone holding Thomas the Tank Engine in one hand and Buzz Lightyear in the other.  We are not at all chic but we’re enjoying ourselves immensely.

What lies beneath? Lego probably. Or dishes from breakfast.