Instagram Star Up and Coming (not)

  I joined Instagram the other day!!!!!!!!!! (drum roll please) I keep calling it Pinterest which shows how much hope there is for me in the social media department. My sister is trying to help my hashtags be not so obscure. However the more I see what is popular on the Instagram I realize that people are desperately searching for pictures that make them feel better. They want to 'heart' pictures that are intensely beautiful and flawless or daring and breathtaking. In that case...I ain't never gonna be an Inst or Insta? star.

   My life is so ordinary in many ways. My kids are dirty, and not that cute trendy dirty (because there is such a thing), they are just dirty. Then my house...it is mishmashed and crazy. I love it so...but I just can't put any filter on it that will make it look anything than what it is! The list continues. My real life has a lot of flowers in it right now, and I love that, but the bouquets don't live very long and I don't have perfect lighting and backdrops in which to create the perfect pictures of them; and my camera doesn't have a great lens so I can't capture the beauty like I see it with my eyes. I don't have trendy clothes and either do my children nor do I dress them in cute bonnets and constantly sprawl with them on perfectly white coverlets covered fresh flowers petals like a lot of other moms apparently do.  My children fight a lot and don't just constantly twirl in Buttercup fields dressed in homemade linen garments either. In fact I just peeled my two year old off my six year old as he screamed something obscure about baths. He is wearing a grey shirt covered in tiny blue bicycles (from, gasp, Walmart!) and a red strawberry stain from yesterday. His two front teeth are rotting which shames me every day but I got a fever when I was pregnant with him in the first trimester and it was high enough that it affected the enamel formation on his front teeth. They are not rotting badly yet but I know the day is coming where he will have to be put under to get them pulled because he is so dramatic that no one will be able to come near him with a ten foot pole to touch those teeth if he is awake and kicking. My children had cheezies for breakfast and then popcorn this morning. Take that Instagram! No adorable pancake stacks with a tiny perfect cluster of blueberries with a mint leaf poised on top.

   I of course gravitate to those pictures, because they are incredibly beautiful...the moms dressed in white with long flowing hair attending their umpteenth vacation or their perfectly distressed dining room tables with that amazing trendy chandelier above it (that was rescued and then repurposed from the pit of hell of course) and those pretty flowers surrounded in perfectly white walls....like their children must be ghosts that just walk through them without actually making any direct contact!!! My walls are covered in dirty toe prints because my ten year old has realized he can scale some of them...so he does. I ask in vain for him to stop but he was so scared of heights for years (his dad couldn't even lift him in his arms because that caused screams of terror) that really I am proud of him for being so brave and I really don't mind just washing the walls down here and there. Here and there being the important term.

   My Instagram page is not going to be some shining star of glistening white and bright ever sunny days. However it will be full of things I love and how my life really looks. I love taking pictures and I try to make them pretty but in all reality....they are just normal and not that special. Just like me, just like all of us (at least that is what we are made to feel according to what is popular). However really, we are all normal and normal is pretty dang amazing if you ask me. Normal is dirty walls, popcorn breakfasts, dad's that work a lot, mom's that stress and age and wish for sleep, normal is cheesy stained faces and cavities, endless laundry that is not hung out on some fairy tale clothes line with wooden pegs, it is messy bedrooms that hold plastic toys not DIYed wooden and wool treasures although sure some are mixed in somewhere, and there are a lot of fights and issues because we all have emotions and we are all trying to figure ourselves out every single day.

  So there you have it!  Have a wonderful, normal day. Eat something you think is delicious, flush your toilet, sigh at the dishes, and put on some music. Love ya lots!! Tansy
PS you can find me at soulshinethrough if you want to on Instagram

                                               This is every single day in my house

My dishwasher is currently not connected or something dumb like that...it does work even though it is so ancient....but I can't use it...so I wash lots of dishes ~

                                                         So fun to pick up these toys..so fun...

                                                                             No linen here

                                         When we go for walks this is what I see. I adore it.

   My husband on our most epic date in years which consisted of driving up to the top of a mountain and being interrupted so many times we left but I loved every minute of it.

                                                    They collected and named...snails.