Such Is {a crafty} Life

The green eyed monster has a name and that name is .......

Andrea. Yep, thats right. I am the green eyed monster. My sister used to say that jealousy is a curse and i have to agree with her. I have discovered in these almost 3 short years of marriage that i am an insanely jealous person. I never noticed it before, maybe i wasn't before and marriage has brought out the worst in me. Who knows.

What, you might ask, am i jealous of? Well, just about everything. You can ask my husband, i'm sure he will tell you i am competely nuts. And it might very well be true. I am not proud of my problem and it is indeed a problem. It stops me from being truely happy. Hopefully i will be able to sort out my feelings and why i'm having them.

I have this friend. Well, she is a friend in the way that we see each other every few months and we have a chat and we occasionally invite her and her husband over for dinner, they occasionally forget and occasionally they remember to come. lol I actually like them very much and i wish we spent more time together but i am so jealous of her! Its crazy. She is like the perfect woman. Shes a couple of years older then me and the mother of 2 girls and a boy due next month. She is pretty, smart and can speak Japanese. She served a mission in Japan. She quilts and scrapbooks very well - I saw samples of her stuff up on the walls of a scrapbooking shop in town. She sings beautifully, she is always in the church choirs and gets solo parts. She has a craft morning at her house so that friends and people from church can come and do there little projects and have fun and talk - I was invited once but i was pregnant and tired and i slept in and wasn't invited again. Oh and my dh had a huge crush on her.
She seems to be everything i am not and everything i would like to be.

Then there are houses. Yes, i am jealous of everyone who has there own house. Insanely jealous. Everytime i see the crazy mess that is my kitchen i curse those woman who have a nice kitchen of there own. Mine is a crazy mess because we don't have enough cupboard space, so one corner is piled with boxes of my dinnerware and other kitchen stuff. We moved in October last year and yes, it's still packed because of our lack of anywhere to put it. Our appliances live on the stove and the ironing board. When we need to use the stove they go on the ironing board and when we need to use the ironing board they go on the stove. Thus the reason i now have melted plastic on one of my hotplates. *warning: do not turn on the hotplate where your electric jug is sitting*
My breadmaker lives on the floor until i need to use it. My kitchen is my main gripe though my bathroom comes a close second. Its small and a family of cockaroaches live in there. One day i will manage to eliminate them. I would love to decorate but the lack of money and that fact that this isn't my house prevent it.
You would think that i would be more thankful for what i have, considering what i lived in while i was in my teens.













Yep that was my house when i was about 13. My mum, my sister and I slept in the shed and my brother in the tent and my dad on a fold out bed, you can just see it on the left, under the awning of leaves. We only lived in that for a couple of months before my dad built another shed that had 4 rooms - 2 bedrooms(one for me and my sister to share and one for my parents, my brother slept in the living room) a living/kitchen and the bathroom which wasn't attached to the main 'house' . Still had dirt floors but we went up in the world by having a wood stove instead of a hollowed out termit nest. I don't have a pic unfortunately.

We lived in that for a few years until my dad built our proper house. It was like luxury! a cement floor instead of dirt, my own room(my sister and brother moved out)
and well.....it was like a proper house, except for the carpet hanging down for walls and our bathroom was still outside. We even had a flush toilet! I lived there until i moved interstate at the age of 19.
This is what it looks liked like last year during the process to make it a REAL house, like the kind other people live in. My dad died before he could finish it.

This is why i can't understand my jealousy of houses. I mean, c'mon, anyone want to volunteer to live like that for 6 years??? It was a great learning experience for us, it made us appreciate things. Everytime someone complained about anything i used to think....what is wrong with you??? you have no idea what its like to rough it. Now i have turned!! I'm that person complaining. How did this happen?
I think what happened is that while i was living the good life in the city for 4 years after i moved out of home, i changed my opinion of what was important in life. Is it seriously about what kind of house i live in? Is it about whether or not i can paint my walls the colour i want? Is it about that fact that someone might have better skills then me? Or can speak a foreign language? No. Its not. Its about being comfortable with who i am. It is finding happiness with what i have in my life. So what if i have to move the appliances off the stove several times a day - I have a loving husband and a gorgous son. We have sufficient for our needs and some of our wants...ok for some of dhs wants ;) We own our own car and by the end of this year we should be debt free.

Then we can work towards getting that house......