Pear Decorating Fail

My parents have been doing some really fun renovations to their home lately which has gotten me thinking about mine.  Maybe it is a combination of wanting to decorate for fall or feeling like I'm living in the Star Wars and Lego aisles at a toy store, but whatever the reason, I have felt inspired to see what I can do to freshen up the house and make it look like a girl actually lives here.  With our food budget skyrocketing as all three of my boys have decided to go on a growth spurt at the same time, I clearly needed to be cheap about it too.

I was putting away groceries when I noticed how pretty the pears I bought were.  The kiddos have been on a fruit binge; awesome since it is summer and fruit is much cheaper and healthier which is why I bought a huge bag of unripe pears to last for the next week.  Usually if I buy the fruit ripe it lasts for all of two days before it mysteriously disappears and as I was trying to avoid a second trip to the grocery store this week, buying it unripe seemed like the thing to do at the time. 

So there I was trying to figure out where to hide the unripe pears when a fabulous decorating idea hit me.  Since the pears had a while before we entered the fruit fly attracting stage, why not use them as a really pretty coffee table center piece!

I was so proud of myself about how pretty they looked.  Until I left the kids in the living room unattended so I could cook dinner.

After dinner I walked back in a tripped over a pear.  On the floor.  As in, not in the bowl...

The rock hard piece of fruit had been gnawed on.

I guess I forgot that I have a 13 month old who loves fruit and is teething.

It looked like Baby Jack Jack had been sorely disappointed that it wasn't actually edible yet and abandoned it on the rug before moving on the the next more exciting event of attempting to climb the stairs.  Clearly, my expectations of home decorating did not match the reality (i.e. chaos) of our situation.  I think God is attempting to teach me to be more patient and not to put fruit down low.  I have now decided that there a many things much more important than a perfectly arranged coffee table.  Like being able to laugh at what the baby does.