Drowning in Laundry

I managed to hurt my back a couple weeks ago when I rather stupidly tried to lift two laundry baskets at the same time. As a result, I couldn't bend or lift for more than a week, which meant I couldn't do the laundry even if I'd wanted to (I didn't). While I was out of action, the laundry accumulated to tsunami-like proportions and I am still trying to wade through it two weeks later. Sadly, nobody gives you pain medication for excess laundry. But they should.

When my kids grow up, I think they're going to remember that I was always doing laundry. There are 5 of us, so the fact that we have a lot of laundry isn't exactly breaking news, but I am so swamped with it right now, I'm starting to wonder if the kids cloned themselves when I wasn't looking.

It certainly doesn't help that one kid wet the bed 2 days ago, soaking the sheet, quilt, and pad, so that bedding had to be added to the backlog. And my eldest has a nasty dust mite allergy, so all of her bedding has to be washed every week -- including the quilt and the Hello Kitty pillow she can't live without. Any time bedding is in the mix, the laundry queue slows way down. At least it does at my house. Then there's the baby who can't finish a meal without smearing Gerbers all over whatever isn't covered by bib, and there's the boy who goes outside and rolls in the mud (and if he can't find mud, he makes his own), and there's the 5-year-old diva who needs a complete costume change 3 times a day or her psyche will be irrevocably shattered. Add to that the husband who wears one outfit to work and changes into another for the evening and the piles really start growing.

I remember with a certain amount of incredulity the days when I really liked doing laundry. When I bought my first place -- a little condo with its own laundry alcove-- I was tickled to bits to be able to do the wash without leaving my house. No more laundromats! When Tim and I were engaged, I actually volunteered to do his laundry. I must have been in love, 'cause now I regard that as a period of temporary insanity. I would never under any circumstances volunteer to do someone else's wash now. Heck, I wouldn't do my own wash if I could find a way to get out of it that didn't involve me either a) paying someone, or b) going naked.

The really awful thing about it, though, is that while you're doing it, people are wearing clothes and getting them dirty. It's an unbroken stream of dirty shirts, jeans, onesies...the Mount Never Rest of being a mom.

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.