It started innocently enough—just a Barbie Dreamhouse tucked into the corner of our living room.
Why the living room?
Because “I just can’t play with it in my room, Mom. If you move it out here, I promise I’ll actually use it.”
So I moved it, and she did use it—for a while. But then came the expansion. The convertible. The camper. The plane. And if that wasn’t enough, the Heeler family (Bluey) moved in next door, and suddenly I wasn’t just raising a daughter, I was managing a full-blown plastic metropolis.
Before I knew it, there was a Barbie Hair Salon, Spencer’s Daycare, and two Barbie pools complete with a slide. There was an endless loop of pool parties, fashion emergencies, daycare pickups, gymnastics, and dramatic rescues. It was imaginative, chaotic, hilarious… and completely taking over my house.
The living room was gone.
The dining room? Annexed.
And the kitchen? That was Barbie’s bedroom.
You know, like any respectable residential layout.
When I suggested we clean up, she looked at me with big eyes and said: “But I’m not done yet.”
After several days of “we have to clean up this town,” it hit me. In her world, “done” means the whole story has ended. But stories like hers, and like mine, don’t wrap up that neatly. They unfold a little each day, and sometimes…they sprawl.
She wasn’t trying to be messy. She was building something. Living inside the beauty of becoming.
And isn’t that what we all do? We make plans, start dreams, chase ideas; and before we know it, parts of our lives start spilling into places they were never meant to occupy. What begins as beautiful creativity can turn into unchecked clutter if we never pause to reset.
So we had to have a talk. I told her: “You can keep playing. The story doesn’t have to end. But we need to clean up at the end of the day so we can live in peace—not just play in chaos.”
She didn’t love it. Honestly, neither did I.
Because it’s hard to draw boundaries around something that feels so alive.
Structure doesn’t kill imagination, it gives it a place to thrive.
We created a system: Barbie bins on the shelf next to the Dreamhouse. One corner of the living room is hers. The rest? Shared space. And every evening, we reset. Not perfectly. Some days Spencer’s Daycare is “still in session.” Some nights, the pool party runs late. But we’re learning.
And through it all, God gently whispers the same lesson to my heart: “You don’t have to finish everything today. But you do need to make room for peace.”
Because as adults, we do the same thing, don’t we? We hold onto conversations we’re not done having. We juggle responsibilities we’re not done carrying. We stretch ourselves into every corner of our lives and call it “balance,” when really it’s just exhaustion dressed up as devotion.
I want her to imagine wildly, play freely, dream without limits.
But I also want her to learn what I’m still learning:
Peace isn’t the absence of mess—it’s the practice of returning things to their place.