blog slacker

I just can’t seem to make myself sit and blog lately. It’s something I need to do. The kids and I love looking through my archives to see what life was like for us two an three years ago. It’s amazing how many little details you forget and how wonderful it is to rediscover them by reading an old post.

This is what we’ve been up to:
We put our house up for sale. We’re not anxious to sell. We just want to see what will happen since the interest rates are super low. Our little town’s home values have not lowered during the recession so – we’ll see what happens. We need to start making plans by having another bedroom since we will be adding another kid- though it’s still probably two years away. (Don’t even ask! I know – it’s taking forever) I love my house being clean all the time BUT I am not loving keeping it clean all the time.

I had three photography jobs this weekend. It felt so good to shoot again. I am so not inspired during the winter. Ugly trees, my kids are pale, brown grass – I always feel more creative when it’s warm and sunny and I can shoot outside. I wish I had a basement where I could set up a little studio.

Let’s see, what else. OH, we’ve been studying ancient Egypt. While I was doing some research online I came across a site that gave directions on how to mummify a chicken. So, we bought a chicken at the grocery store, removed it’s innards, and packed in all down in ziplock bags filled with a mixture of baking soda and salt. This whole process will take at lest 60 to 72 days to complete. As we were scrubbing the chicken down and packing it full of salt, I began to think – WHAT IN THE WORLD WAS I THINKING. I have to change of the dry mixture every 5 days for the first two weeks and then every 10 days toward the end. I am such a germ freak – I keep thinking every thing was contaminated and I was sliding all the stuff in bags and the kids wanted to touch, see, hold and sniff things. It’s a stresser knowing I have to repeat that process so often over the next two months. The kids are really excited about it though and the whole thing gives application to what they have been learning – SO – I will deal with it.

Other than that – nothing much has been going on. The kids are so into each other it’s just so beautiful to me how they love one another. Two days ago my middle child said this to me, “Mommy, it’s sad that you don’t have any brothers and sisters.” I replied, “Why?” She answered, “Because I really love my sister and brother. I love having them to play with.” What a blessing. That is always want I desired for my kids. Since I wasn’t able to have siblings, I wanted my children to be best friends. They are and I am so thankful for that.

I am still weeding through all my photos from this past weekend, but I will post this one. She’s a joy and I loved photographing her!

intervention

Late this afternoon staring into the bathroom mirror putting on my mascara, feeling stressed that the day has just disappeared, I realized my voice had grown from stern to full out yelling at the kids to get their rooms clean. The past week the kids had opted out of cleaning their rooms which meant they were missing out on certain privileges. Obviously those privileges didn’t mean enough to them because they had zero motivation to get it done. Well today, Granddad was on his way to stay the night so that meant it was no longer an option … it was mandatory. It was slow moving and I needed it to be fast paced. It was lots of “she’s not doing this” and “I don’t want to pick up that” when I desperately needed some teamwork. Well, as I coated my last lash and my angry tone was in full force, my quiet inner voice spoke to me and said, “Your behavior is affecting me negatively in the following ways.” Recognize that line? YES … A&E’s Intervention. We just watched it the night before and it hit me like a ton of bricks … I am allowing my kids behavior to affect me negatively. So I yell, “EVERYONE TO THE COUCH.” Then I calmly explain that I was not going to yell anymore about this. I laid it out — all the consequences they would receive if the work was not done in exactly one hour. (they were tough ones … ones I knew would motivate them to complete the work) Guess what, one hour later the timer went off and I hadn’t heard one tattle, I hadn’t raised my voice not one more time and their rooms were in perfect order. Thanks intervention!

in the zone

If my house had a voice it would be screaming at me, “I desperately need to be CLEANED!” Thankfully it doesn’t and thankfully yesterday I had nothing scheduled but to clean my home. Being in town, out of town, in town, hanging with friends, out of town again, board meetings, home school events, pictures, editing pictures … my house was completely neglected. I still need to focus on my car, I am dreading that one, and organize my dining room but with the help of a 300 piece puzzle and review math sheets to keep the kids busy … I accomplished a ton yesterday. I didn’t even email a single person or talk on the phone … I was so in the cleaning zone! Hopefully I will be driven again today and knock the rest of the stuff out!

same goes for the car …

I can’t keep a car clean to save my life! Out of our car I just got out 10 movies, a dozen books (yes one was a very over due library book!), enough clothes to make a complete load of laundry, several bags of trash, a sack of toys and gobs of crafts from church and co-op (a home schooling class).

Speaking of crafts … my kids generate more paper crafts than a baby chicken produces poop. Their creativity absolutely thrills me, but I have to say I secretly throw most of it away. We’d have to rent some sort of storage unit to preserve every piece of art they conjure up.

Look at them go. Almost every day this table looks like this.

it's just the way it is … and always will be, for now

If there was some kind of contest or award system to classify who’s household can get trashed in the least amount of time, I am sure we’d rank somewhere in the top 5.

I am messy, clean, but messy, add three kids and one husband who is very neat (praise the LORD!) that all equals 5, take a 1500 square foot home, divide it out and we all have 300 square feet to trash, which seems to take all but about 30 minutes to an hour to do. I did struggle recently with wanting a bigger home … thinking it’d help keep the mess under control if we all just had more room and an extra potty so we didn’t have to stand in line. But I realized, a bigger house equals more square footage that we’d take advantage of and mess up just the same. It would just take me longer to clean up and I honestly love having only one bathroom to clean.

Am I whining? No. Seriously I am not. I love love love my home. It is so me/us. We live in our house … like we’re here 24 hours a day. I just have to keep reminding myself of that when I look around and realize, wow, I just had everything under control and it seems like instantly it’s chaos again.

Yeah, I know I do a post like this periodically … so expect another in a few months : )

kitchen clean up

Don’t ya hate it when it gets like this ….

Now go have a great rest of the day knowing your kitchen has got to be cleaner than mine!

it could have been bad

So, I did tons of laundry last week, I got completely caught up, then for some reason I took an entire week off. So, I went to start sorting the piles and while washing my first of many loads, it happened … lots of strange noises resonate from my washing machine and when the cycles are through, I have clothes that are sopping wet. Not a good thing, especially since my hubby would be returning the next day with even more clothes needing to be laundered. So, I call Maytag, They can send someone out in 6 days. Oh, no … that is not good, not good at all. For some reason I just can’t imagine me and 3 kids at the local laundry mat hanging out washing clothes and doing math worksheets. So, (I know, I like saying so) I call around. I give them my spill on what the machine was doing and then they give me a general diagnosis … the transmission is out. (who knew a washing machine had a transmission) At last I get in touch with an angel …Susan, she works for an authorized Maytag service fix it place and she confidently informs me help is on the way today. Whoo HOO! Mike the service man is at my door within an hour. He throughly checks it out … turns out it’s only a minor thing … I pay him just $50 … my washer works again!

what is wrong with this picture?

I finally got caught up on laundry yesterday and after folding a ka-gillion loads, yes it was a ka-gillion, these were the kids piles. I want to point out the tiny pile on the left. That is #1’s, all the other clothes … they belong to the girls. Either #1 has a lot of dirty clothes in his drawers or his sisters are changing clothes like 5 times a day. Something ain’t right.

my clean one

I woke up to this and almost immediately I got stressed out. I hate starting out days when you feel like things are already literally stacked up against you. But we made it through. I am not sure when I will get over the fact that it takes hours to clean a home and seconds, really milli-seconds (not sure if that is correct, but I really don’t care, you get the point) to destroy it. After lunch, the kids and I got things back in order, and they did it without whining and complaining. WHOO HOO!

Speaking of cleaning, my #2 is a little cleaning machine. I mean it had to happen to at least one of our kids. My man, his mom, his grandmom, my mom, are all neat freaks so the gene had to come up in one of my offspring. She loves to help me with the house work. #3 thinks she wants to help but she can wimp out real quick, #2 will stay with me for the long haul. She helps me sweep, she asks to make my bed and her siblings and anything that comes in a spray bottle, she is all over it! Now, she can make a mess, like dumping out a bunch of toys, but, she is the neatest of the 3 and the most orderly. It will be interesting to see how this trait plays out the older she gets.

Here are some silly pictures of her that she did in photo booth today. She is my shy, and I mean SHY, one. And since her sister is a huge ham, I hardly ever get any silly pictures of her. She is my snuggly lovable beautiful girl.

I am so thankful to have 3 unique, beautiful, talented and extremely different kids.

the ride down

Life can’t always be perfect. You can’t live on the mountain top forever.

I’ve been on a high for a while now. Things have just been almost too good. So good that sometimes you pinch yourself to make sure that it’s all real. Well, the girls have begun to bicker constantly, our school year has just started and I feel behind already – that means I am struggling internally with anxiety plus my house is one big HUGE dust bowl, the girls want to help me clean but they keep making a bigger mess and they won’t follow my directions so I am losing my patience. I woke up with a tummy ache so I didn’t exercise and the youngest got me up a 6:44 am, 20 minutes before my alarm was scheduled to go off, so it took me awhile to stop pouting over my lost sleep.

I know my attitude weighs heavy on how far down this ride will go. I am determined to keep positive. Or at least at in this moment I think I can. Even if we go lower and lower, I know it’s only a matter of time and we’ll be on the rise. Life is just like that.