That Warm, Peaceful Glow

Here's what I got done this weekend:

1. Mopped the kitchen


2. Tidied the living room so Tim could vacuum (kids helped with this)


3. Bought new frames and hung them the same day


4. New quilt came (thanks UPS!) and I got the exquisite pleasure of making my bed. Now it looks like this:
   
5. Finished fleshing out Grant's summer wardrobe (except for sandals -- need to add that to the list)


6. Bought and watched hubby assemble new BBQ grill; grilled steaks for the first time in almost 2 years. YUM.


7. Put away 3 large baskets of laundry


8. Planned meals and then grocery shopped for the week


9. Reorganized Tim's dresser so that I can put clothes in it, as opposed to the charming, devil-may-care, stuff-hanging-out-of-it look it used to have.

My kitchen is still a mess, neither bathroom is clean and the upstairs one is so gross it has to constitute a health hazard. I still have 3 small baskets of kid laundry to put away, but I can see the light at the end of the tunnel. It's amazing how much more I feel like doing stuff when the sun is shining. I even played (read:refereed) a game of Chutes and Ladders with Grant and Abby Kate and managed to get a 20 minute nap on Sunday. Mother of the Year, baby. Mother of the Year.

TGIF

It's Friday. Sweet Friday when my in-laws come take my older two children away for the afternoon and I can actually accomplish tasks. Accomplish tasks. You know, where you start something and finish it all in the same day.

This happens so rarely, that when it does, when I actually manage to finish something, I have such a sense of well-being, of peace and warmth, I hardly know what to do with myself. And I'm talking, here, about things outside the normal, have-to-get-done chores like laundry and cooking and cleaning. I'm talking about things like painting, hanging pictures, washing baseboards, organizing the Christmas decorations, sorting through clothes and dropping them off at Goodwill on the same day -- that kind of stuff.

And lest this makes me sound like some kind of hyper-clean, ultra-neat, organizational prodigy, let me state right here that I am none of these things. Even before I had kids I was cleaning-challenged, and 3 children later I have in large measure given up. Let me illustrate.

We have a wall between our living and dining rooms which is made of columns -- three columns on a 3-foot half-wall and then a full row of little columns that stretches all the way across the room. These little columns are near the ceiling. After my first child was born, my mom came over to clean for me and she dusted the little columns on their little ledge. She commented on how dusty they were and explained to me how to use my vacuum cleaner attachments to clean them. Two years later she came to clean after my second child was born and dusted the columns again. Two years after that, I dusted them because we were getting ready to paint them and even I know paint doesn't stick all that well to dust. So in the 10 years we've lived in this house, the columns have now been dusted a total of 3 times.

See? I am not going to make the cover of Clean Home anytime soon.

A lot of cleaning around here happens on a priority basis: closets get cleaned if people are moving to a new room or if we can't actually wedge any more clothes into the available space; floors get mopped when I can see smudges; massive cleaning occurs only if we've been foolish enough to invite people over for dinner. When my youngest was baptized, we had a houseful of people and this place absolutely sparkled. That was 5 months ago and there's been very little sparkle since.

Some cleaning occurs for mental health reasons, as in "Mommy is going to burst a blood vessel unless these toys are put away right now." This happens more than I am comfortable with.

So today is a day for me to get some stuff done. I'm not sure what that stuff will be. It will certainly be less than I hope to accomplish and it may be derailed by something more pressing, like putting away laundry or clearing off a portion of the kitchen counter so I can remember what color it is. But it will be quiet, and peaceful, and something, however small, will be finished at the end of the day.

Fear and Loathing

Today, after 3 days of rain, in an effort to find something for my kids to do in the afternoon other than watch PBS Kids for another straight day, I went to Hobby Lobby in search of arts and crafts. This was truly a trip of severe desperation because I hate doing crafts with my kids.

I know people who love to do crafts with their kids, who intentionally set aside time to craft with them, who rhapsodize about bonding and the closeness they share doing latch-hooking or embellishing flip flops.

I think they are lying.

The only time I've truly had a good time crafting with my kids is when we've gone somewhere else to do it. Someone else bought the supplies, set up the crafting area, and cleaned up the mess when it was over and that person was not me.

It is possible that other people's kids don't re-purpose craft supplies in a way that gives their parents fits. They don't, for instance, use fingerpaint as eye shadow or try to turn foam alphabet stickers into nose suppositories. But my children do and because of this, I never feel like I can get ahead of them as we're trying to do a craft. Even if I get everything out ahead of time and have the instructions memorized, some little u-turn will occur that makes my blood pressure skyrocket. Once I was helping child #1 with something, only to look up and see child #2 eating glue stick. While I was fishing glue stick out of his mouth and explaining that this was yucky, child #1 up-ended a plateful of glitter onto the floor. That happened almost a year and a half ago and I still occasionally find glitter lurking in the various nooks and crannies of my kitchen.

Today I tried to be a step ahead by purchasing complete craft kits, rather than just random supplies. This was not really successful because while the kits are supposed to have
everything you need, they always seem to be lacking something -- it might be critical, it might not, but I guarantee you won't know you need it until you're in the middle of the process. Today we made window catchers with metal frames that you fill with colored plastic beads and bake in the oven. Honestly, I don't know why this seemed like a good idea in the store. They turned out kind of cute, except that child #2 immediately mixed up all his bead colors so his puppy looks like a cocker/dalmation with one red ear. Child #1 picked up her frame after we'd spent 20 minutes filling each little cell with different colored beads. Result? Beads fell out the bottom of the frame and we had to start over, at which point she informed me that she was tired of putting the beads in and could I just do it for her, please? I am thanking God I didn't succumb to the sand craft kit. I would have jumped off a bridge before we completed that one.

I try, I really do. I know kids need permission to get dirty, to explore their environment, to try things. But in general I think crafts are just hazardous to my health. What good is it if you have a nice foam door hanger or a lovely set of embellished flip-flops if Mommy has to be sedated afterward?

Not the Cordon Bleu...

Last night, I made chicken and noodles for dinner. This is a particularly easy recipe which involves chicken and noodles, two things which I loved as a kid. Abby Kate, however, reacted as though we'd heaped rat droppings and arsenic on her plate and refused to eat it. This attitude was immediately picked up by Grant, who refused to eat his chicken and noodles on grounds that if his sister thought it was bad, it must be bad. This notwithstanding the fact that he likes 50 times more things than she does and is in general far less suspicious about what we give him to eat. Tonight, however, it appeared that they were onto me and my plot to overthrow the family by feeding them nutritious and delicious food. [insert evil laugh here]

This is one of the true frustrations of SAHM parenting: what to feed the kids. I think every family has at least one child who would happily live on bread and peanut butter, with a few Cheetos thrown in for variety. In my family, it was my sister who only ate hot dogs and pbjs until she was about 15. In my husband's family it was his brother who ordered a ham sandwich at every restaurant they ever went to, including McDonald's. Except for vegetables, I ate pretty much everything and my husband really shone at the dinner table, which was good for him since he was in trouble pretty much everywhere else. Now we, who always seem to be able to find food we like, have produced a child whose "worst enemy" is meat -- and don't try to confuse her by explaining that chicken nuggets and hot dogs are meat, because it won't wash.

"What is this?" she would ask at every dinner. For a while we fooled her by saying "Roast aardvark." That got her to try sloppy joes and meatloaf. But after a few months of that, she began to suspect that we weren't having roast aardvark at every meal and that some of the stuff we were making her try was, in fact, meat. MEAT.

MEAT!!!!

We considered the possibility that she might be a natural vegetarian, but decided that anyone who ate hot dogs (the lowest form of meat) with as much evident enjoyment as she did couldn't possibly be a true vegetarian. Then, too, we thought she really should show a marked preference for vegetables or other sources of nutrients and vitamins and antioxidants and whatnot. Perhaps if Skittles were considered a food group...

So I spend every afternoon either racking my brain for something I can make for dinner that won't engender prolonged screaming, or gearing up for said screaming as I make something guaranteed to annoy. Add to this the brain damage that having 3 children has caused -- the kind of brain damage that prevents you not only from knowing what to make for dinner, but from remembering what you know how to make for dinner -- and you've got a recipe for stress. I literally had to make a list of things I know how to cook because after my 3rd was born I could stand with a jar of spaghetti sauce in one hand and a package of noodles in the other and think to myself, "What do I do with these?" And I refer to that list often, during those all-too-frequent moments when my mind goes utterly blank, usually when I'm holding open the fridge door at about 3:30, hoping beyond hope that I have ingredients on hand to at least fill stomachs, if not inspire slavish adoration.

And since I am the stay at home parent, this little pleasure falls to me. There's really no question about who's going to be making dinner...it's me. It's always me. So here's my short list (very short, sadly) of things I can make without inspiring a hunger strike:

bacon, eggs and pancakes

tostadas

cashew chicken (though really #1 daughter eats mainly rice at this meal)

grilled cheese and tomato soup

corn dogs

pigs in a blanket (or fancy corn dogs)

chicken nugget kabobs (chicken nuggets and biscuits on bamboo skewers)

And that's it. Certainly I make other things: meatloaf, mu shu patties, cheese soup, the infamous chicken and noodles, hamburgers, fajitas. But these are the select few that allow me to have a meal in peace. Everything else requires a whole lotta Motrin.

Thanks, Easter Bunny!

Now that Candypalooza, sometimes called "Easter," is over, my children are awash in sugar. I used to ration their candy consumption -- one piece after lunch, one after dinner -- but this just meant that their Halloween candy lasted until Valentine's Day, at which point they received a whole new batch of candy that then lasted until Easter. The Easter batch lasted until their birthdays and the upshot was that they had candy every single day, all year long.

Now I let them eat as much as they like in a sort of free-for-all sugar orgy until it's gone. Yes, they have to be tied to a chair if I need them to focus for more than 10 seconds on something, but the candy goes away much quicker, which is better for Mommy's waistline.

Another little discovery I've made is that this gift candy is basically kid money. And if kids have money, they can be fined. Refuse to get dressed? That's a peanut butter egg. Pitch a fit just as we're loading the van to go to school? The Bank of Mom will repossess your jellybeans. Get caught in the bathroom filling the sink with toilet cleanser? Bye bye Peeps. And the great thing about losing candy is, it's painful. And we all know a punishment only works if it hurts.

This fining thing works so well that I took all 3 kids to the grocery store yesterday -- something I only do if we are completely out of food -- and after the first fine was handed down (for knocking containers of pudding off the shelves), my normally rambunctious children were good as gold for the rest of the trip. First time ever that I've been able to leave the grocery store and still look people in the eye.

I saw the cogs turning in their little minds as the realization sank in : "she can take our candy away....Candy! Away!" Oh, what a sweet, sweet revelation. Mother of the Year, here I come.

So Stinkin' Cool

I wanted to do sign with my older children, but couldn't find a good resource for it. I might add, I was also too cheap to buy a book on signing. Consequently they only learned "please" "thank you" and "more" -- and later I found out I was doing "more" incorrectly. Ah well. Now, however, there's a great site on the web with some basic signs for babies, so I am trying again with my littlest.

This is just one of a whole host of things I could file under "Wish I'd Done With My First Two." I think ( I hope -- oh no...is it just me?) all parents do this. We find stuff out after the fact and then play the blame game for not being omnicient while raising our older kids. One area in which I was woefully underinformed was sleep. This book absolutely revolutionized my approach to kids and sleep and I have wondered many times whether my oldest would be a better sleeper if I'd had this book when she was a baby. I remember when she started going to bed at 9 p.m. and how elated we were not to be up until midnight anymore. We were similarly thrilled when our son started hitting the hay at around the same time. They were both about 7 months old.

Contrast that with my littlest one, who since she was 7 months old, has been going to bed at 6:30 p.m. and sleeping until about 6:30 or 7 a.m.. I am not kidding. Twelve hours of sleep, in addition to the 3.5 hours she sleeps during the day. The sleep advice in this book is so counter-intuitive, I almost dismissed it out of hand. But the good doctor was right and now peace reigns in Sleepy Valley once more. The real happy ending is that the 5 and 3 year olds go to bed at 7:30, so that's 3.5 hours of total freedom for Mommy and Daddy. The fact that we use that freedom to watch countless hours of mediocre television in no way diminishes its value.

Making a Splash

I'm sure everyone wants to make their first blog post a real zinger. What to write about? What intellectual or cultural subjects to plumb? What aspects of the universal psyche shall we address?

Baby Alive.

Yep. That's my springboard to the web. Baby Alive. This was the hot item for Christmas 2006. It was also the only really significant thing on our 5 year old's list. Every store in the city was sold out. We trolled ebay, but couldn't bring ourselves to pay the extortionate prices. So like many other parents, my husband and I sweated bullets wondering if Toys R Us would get one in before the 24th. They did, and my husband abruptly left work at 10 in the morning to race over and plunk down $50 for what has to be one of the oddest looking dolls ever (and in one of those gosh-I-wish-I'd-been-there moments, he said he walked in, found the first person he could with a name tag and said "take me to Baby Alive.")

We debated whether Santa would bring Baby Alive on Christmas morning, but ultimately we decided that since we'd gone to so much effort procuring said baby, we ought to get the credit. And it was good credit...the kind of credit usually reserved for grandparents and wealthy aunts.

So now my daughter's childhood dream is fulfilled. Baby Alive lives, eats, drinks and poops at our house. And in one of life's little ironies, my daughter is freaked out by the green poopy diapers, so I get to change Baby Alive in addition to the real live (and often poopy) baby we already have. My darling girlfriend, Angie, said "and that's why Kaitlyn didn't get Baby Alive. I am not changing a doll's diapers."

I know. It's dumb. Why would I, already responsible for the wiping of several assorted bottoms, take on another source of poo? It's simple: because I never got a Baby Alive when I was a kid. And I really wanted one.

No doubt this will come back to bite me in the butt, but just last week my daughter said "Thanks mom for getting me Baby Alive. She's the best baby ever!" The credit just keeps rollin' in.