Not Quite Ready for HGTV

The kids are helping me redecorate the house one piece at a time.

Well, no. Let me rephrase that.

The kids are helping me redecorate the house by destroying one piece at a time.

Someone recently asked me how long I'd lived in this house. I was aghast when I really thought about it. My daughter was a baby when we moved in here. Interior design wasn't really a priority of ours seven years ago.

It isn't much of a priority now either, but I am getting just a tiny bit sick of our decorating theme. I call it early hand-me-downs and gifts I feel obliged to display.

And the quilts...oh, the quilts.

Let me explain. When I was in college my mom started quilting. And quilting and quilting. Now she even owns her own quilting business. So every holiday and major life event has been marked by the gift of one of her quilts.

Some of them are amazing. They really are. They went well with our early nineties style. But I have a lot of them.

And the kids! My goodness. They must have a dozen or so each. I can't even fit them on their closet shelves anymore.

So as much as I appreciate my mother's gifts, I'm just really over feeling like I live in a quilt museum. I'd love to redecorate, but I'm afraid of hurting my mother's feelings.

Enter my daughter, who decided to jump on the couch. She started to fall (big surprise) and put her hand on the wall to steady herself. But eighty percent of the walls in our house are covered in quilts, and she pulled it, and the wooden rack it hung on, down on top of herself. The rack broke and now I have an excuse not to rehang that quilt.

One down, two hundred and seventy-six to go.

I could only be so mad at my daughter.

My son followed this stunt up with one of his own. He kicked a soccer ball into a portrait in a very traditional frame, and now I am one more step closer to the modern design I would love.

"Mom always said, 'Don't play ball in the house!'"

I figure if I continue to let the kids run amok inside my house, I can have it totally redecorated before my husband gets home from Iraq. They better pick it up though. As fast as they destroy these things, new ones find their way into our home.

This summer, my mother taught my daughter how to quilt.

I'm doomed!