Nice Things

I resigned the notion of owning nice things a while ago...kids just destroy stuff. They can't help it. Not that I am just letting them galavant around the house with tennis racquets in their hands while I listlessly watch on. But something in their nature is destructive. Maybe it is the fact that they don't understand monetary value, or perhaps they just don't have full control of their bodies yet. I don't fault them for it, but I try hard to pad the damage as much as I can.

Here is a good example: Today we were walking to a park and Waverly stepped on my sandal. It broke. It was just an accident and may have broken tomorrow with someone else, but for some reason it broke when she stepped on it. Yeah, my sandals are a few years old and maybe this was just coincidental, but have you ever known anyone in life that this kind of thing just happens to? Like they throw a rock and it breaks a window, even if the nearest window is in the opposite direction? I have, and I'm not saying my kids share that curse, but I think all children have this problem for at least a few years, if not a dozen or so.

I hot glued this back in. We'll see if it works.

I am not immune. One time, in my teens, I was getting something in my garage and I knocked a ladder over that happened to fall on my dad's Mustang GT convertible, piercing the top like it was made of paper. It certainly wasn't on purpose, but it happened. Wasn't the first thing I broke either, and certainly not the last (just ask my parents).

So our solution is to just not have nice things. Not like super cheap stuff, but not really nice either. We got our last two couches from the clearance section of Wayfair.com, and you know what? It only took about a day or two for our kids to wipe snot or drool or grease on them. If we had paid a couple thousand dollars for those couches, you can imagine how upset I might have been at this. But we didn't invest much into them, and so it took all that pressure off of both us and our kids to keep them nice.

Again, not that we buy crap and then destroy it -- we keep things clean and try to buy durable stuff that lasts. But can you imagine the constant tension I would feel with my kids running around expensive tables and chairs, or riding their tricycles around a Tesla in our driveway? No thanks.

This is one of the nice things we have. It was a gift, and has swiftly been damaged multiple times.

I guess I'm writing this to share something we do that I think works, and also to give you encouragement if you do the same thing. I haven't always been proud of our living room sets (though right now I really like it), and sometimes our furniture doesn't match. But my mind is at ease when things go wrong, and that is worth more than any custom made solid wood coffee table.