I am fighting a never ending battle in this household.
Not about eating veggies, the importance of wiping front to back, or even about going to bed at night. While all of these are very real struggles, there is one that trumps all battles and has escalated into full blown nuclear holocaust.
The fucking shoes.
Not only are my children (and to be perfectly honest, my husband (and to be even more honest, on rare occasions, me)) apparently genetically wired to accumulate as many pairs of shoes as possible, they lack the portion of DNA that handles putting them away.
Our house is small. And very awkwardly put together. Our house is the pre-pubescent tweenage boy of houses who just hit a growth spurt and possibly discovered a hair or two where there had not been one before. Just like the man-boy, our house has dreams of one day growing up, learning to drive, and possibly getting to second base. It is just all the awkward limbs and acne and voice cracking is getting in the way.
Or, since I am talking about my abode, rooms that lead to rooms, lack of closet space, rooms modernized after the fact with newfangled things like running water and electricity and asbestos-free insulation, a random addition that did not add much usable square footage, and one bathroom for five people, four of whom are female.
It's awkward. I think you get it.
Anyways, since you abruptly enter our house and are immediately in the living room, I have had to carve out some kind of area where people could hang coats, take off shoes, and whatnot. The problem is, during the winter, my husband has roughly 8 trillion coats and takes up every goddamned spot on the coat rack. Plus there is a limited space for people to take off their shoes, and unfortunately when they do so they usually are having to schlep through whatever the people before them tracked into my house. And if a lot of people are over, the shoes pile up. It's really a fire hazard and thank God the fire marshal does not inspect the house because we'd get one hefty fine there, I tell you what.
What is worse, though, are the sheer number of shoes that we own as a family and trying to corral all of them. I could have the kids put them up in their rooms...but there is a distinct lack of closet space and they would likely get lost in the abyss of their rooms, along with all matches to socks, library books, my sanity, and quite possibly other small children/mammals.
I have been struggling with how to organize all of the fucking shoes. Not only shoes, but the 8 billion work boots my husband has to match his 8 billion coats. Work boots are impossibly to store in a cute fashion. Not that my house is cute, because it is all pre-pubescent boys and decorated in early poverty, but I do like to pretend occasionally that I'm all Pinterest savvy and gonna do my house up all Trading Spaces style. I have tried numerous configurations. Baskets, drawers, piles, shoe racks. Nothing is ever a good solution. This is the Good Housekeeping equivalent of the unsolvable equation in theoretical mathematics. It is a mystery that will be studied and pondered on by future generations in much the same way that we marvel at Stonehenge and its seeming purposelessness.
The current shoe situation is that each of the three girls has their own basket next to the love seat. There is a shoe rack on the other side of the loveseat that has all of Charles's boots and the two other pairs of shoes he has that aren't work boots. Then in our room, which is (awkwardly) off of the living room, I have all of my shoes in a two drawer dresser thingy and a basket. It makes it tolerable, I guess. Until it isn't and I have a nervous breakdown and am found in the corner of my house, wearing work boots and licking the heels of my stilettos while rocking back and forth and humming "Roxanne".
I don't really have a clever way to end this post. The shoe situation...kinda sucks. It is awkward, just like my house and tweenage boys. Oh, lookit there! Hot damn, I found my ending!
Updated to add: My husband feels that this post makes him look like a slob. I asserted that it made him look like he has a work boot fetish. We both concurred that neither was really all that flattering...so in his defense, I *may* have exaggerated by a few billion the number of work boots he has. Like maybe 7.99999999 billion plus 4. But in my defense, once upon a time, he may have had 8 pairs.
And don't criticize me if my math is wrong above. I may or may not have had a drink or four tonight.
