My day :)

My day started out with one baby nursing in bed with me, and a 2-year-old cold, bare bum nudging in beside me. One of my eyes peered open through matted eyelashes to see two big blue eyes staring at me through curly bangs. “Hi mom. You’re not modest.”

“I’m not? Well neither are you, sweetie.” :)

Take a quick shower, during which I decide to do something “different” with my hair today. My beautiful sister Chantile told me how she’d done hers last Sunday…I’ll try it. :) The first step of this different hairstyle requires wearing my hair in a towel for a while…no problem.

Wait. How do people in the movies get these towels to stay? I’m flipping it, I’m twisting it, really…hard…ow, ow, owwwwch…I think I got some hairs twisted in there. Oh well, I’m not fixing it because it’s finally staying.

Kiss my Love out the door and pour some cheerios for the kids, all the time trying to balance this massive towel on my head.

“Mom, you look strange.”

“What honey? I can’t hear what you’re saying with this towel over my ears.”

Eat a petrified “soft” pretzel that was leftover from baking time with the girls a few days ago, try not to break a tooth, and roll out the old yoga mat for some yoga time.

I must say, this towel wobbling on my head produced variations on poses which I don’t believe have ever been done. I’m not sure they were all good for me. I considered taking the towel off of my head during yoga, but I don’t want to because I really want to try to look nice today and try this new ‘do. C’mon, towel, work with me.

Warrior I with a towel in my eyes. “Mom, she spilled her cheerios!” I pretend not to hear through the towel around my ears.

“See, mom?” Now there are soggy cheerios on my mat. Oh, well. Focus. Breathe. Come up, but don’t step on the squishy cheerios.

Yoga finishes with the towel in various stages of disarray. Plow pose was fun, legs straight up in the air today, because bending them over my head made the towel suffocate me. I send the girls on potty trips preparatory to getting dressed and starting school. I return triumphant to my bathroom to unleash the gorgeous, curly hair.

Unleash it did. And though it brought the curly, it forgot the gorgeous. But that’s okay…we’ll work with this. I start to scrunch mousse into it. Getting curlier, but no gorgeous yet. More mousse? More? Maybe some hairspray. Let’s see, poof that part up, and…WOW. That’s some big hair. Really big hair. Not like Chantile’s at all. But wow, it’s curly. And big.

Hairclips? Let’s try it. Well….

They hold the hair down in places, only to allow it to spring up with all the more energy all around them.

I emerge from the bathroom to my fashion critics.

“Mom, that’s interesting hair today.”

“Mom, you look strange.”

“Let’s do school,” I say.

“Okay, but can I keep my hair like it is right now?”

School passes pleasantly enough and we catch up on some things we’ve needed to. Then comes the dreaded time when I need to print something.

We just got a new computer as our old one died the same weekend that our baby destroyed someone’s camcorder. (Expensive weekend.) This new computer is great, but has intermittent (read that: most of the time) issues with our printer. It just won’t print for me, and no amount of purging and spooling works for me. So I fight with the dumb printer for an hour, because what I need to print for school today is very important. I finally have success and print off item number 1, number 2, and finally….nope, it freezes again. Of course I waited until the last item to print the thing I needed most for school.

Meanwhile, the house is getting slowly more destroyed by the girls. The baby, who has been told twenty times, “Just one more second, baby, and I’ll feed you,” finally crawls to a pile of pjs in the middle of the room and crashes. I pick her up and try to feed her some yogurt through her sleepy stupor. Most of it ends up on my brown shirt…white streaks everywhere. Cool. I nurse her and put her down, intermingled with making beanies and weenies for lunch for the girls.

The girls have been so patient this morning with the printer issues that I give them a special treat with lunch: koolaid. Of course, lunch that makes it down them is 90% koolaid, 10% food. :) But the orange koolaid-staches are to die for. :)

Too wound up now to stop giggling, I run them through the potty and warm up some milk to help settle them down.

It doesn’t work. One of them, the 2-year-old, just can’t stop giggling. I ask her to sleep. I plead. I beg. I threaten. (No bodily harm…just “no doll house.”) I give up.

5 minutes later, while I am finally eating some lunch, she comes out, and giggling like crazy, asks if she can sleep in the bathroom.

“Can you sleep where?”

“In the baffroom.”

I figure, what the heck. It might stun her enough to get her to settle down. I didn’t think she’d stay there. I made her a fast little bed in the bathroom. (Child services: It was clean-ish and she asked.) She laid down giggling. I came out to wait out the 30 seconds I figured it would be before she asked to be taken back to bed.

She fell asleep instantly. And with her out of the picture, so did her sisters.

Ahhhhhhhhhhhh. FOUR ASLEEP AT ONCE. It was so….I don’t know…what’s the word? I can’t quite seem to think of it.

Oh yes.

Quiet.

I couldn’t believe it. What to do with myself?

I surveyed the damage of the morning. I wasn’t feeling well at all yesterday, so it’s particularly bad today. Hats all over the floor. (They love hats.) Doll house open and little family strewn about. PJs piled in the middle of the floor. About five blankets lying in heaps here and there. Coffee table anywhere but in the middle of the floor, legs slightly askew. Couch pillows squished into unrecognizable lumps, tossed about. School papers dripping like confetti across the table. Brown bananas on the counter, along with an empty milk carton. Trash overflowing. Toys and books everywhere. Groceries from the night before still in bags by the door, except for the bags they opened and began to trail across the floor. Breakfast and lunch dishes still on the table.

I could go on, but you might begin to think I’m a poor housekeeper. We wouldn’t want that.

Trying to decide what to attack first, I’m at a loss. I peek in the school room. I just close the door.

I decide to just read my scriptures for a minute…maybe that will give me the get-up-and-go I need to clean this bear pit. :) Before I sit down, I catch a glimpse of myself in the mirror. Brown shirt streaked with white yogurt and baby spit. Probably poop, too. Oh, and there’s the little booger my 2-year-old wiped on me (see? she’s getting better!). Hot pink yoga pants (and by “hot,” we’re going with the “neon” definition). No makeup, showing a sleep-deprived face in all its’ glory, and hair…wow. Still with the hair. It’s literally sticking out everywhere. That mousse is effective stuff. Ah, well. :)

So, I start to read, and when I’m done, I decide to pray. Don’t think I’m trying to sound saintly…I’m just trying to survive. :) I lean my head down on my scriptures and close my eyes. I’m a little chilly, so I wrap a blanket around me as I huddle in mommy prayer.

30 minutes later, I shoot awake with my forehead indented by my scriptures to a loud noise.

“Huh? What? Who am I? Am I alive?”

It’s knocking.

And it continues. I stumble up and fall part-way over, as I am still tangled in my prayer-blanket. I stumble to the door in a drunken stupor, willing the girls to stay asleep through the knocking.

I fling the door open, and blink fast to make my contacts unstick from wherever they are and recenter themselves on my eyeballs so I can see who it is.

Well, I don’t know her, but she’s lovely. Dressed in a gorgeous outfit with about three different coordinated layers, sparkling jewelry glittering in the sun, perfect, glistening hair, holding a plate of steaming cookies in one hand and a perfectly-dressed infant in the other. And to top it off, her hair is exactly what I was trying to do to mine today. Only it looks good. :)

“Hi!” Then the shock of my appearance hits her. It’s 3:00 in the afternoon and I look like…well you know that cat in Opus?

Anyway, bless her little heart, she’s my new neighbor and very sweet, and she tried to cover her shock at seeing me, yogurt and booger smeared, with wild woman hair and a scripture dented forehead.

I invited her in, and we stepped over the diapers that had been pulled out of their package and the complete mayhem all over my floor. I invited her to sit. I was still trying to blink my contacts into place.

I sat on a pile of blankets and pillows on the couch. She very kindly tried to find something in the apartment to compliment, a feat on a day like today. :)

“So tell me about yourself. What do you do all day?”

“I homeschool.”

I’m sure that after seeing me, every crazy back-woods homeschooling rumor just got confirmed in her mind. Poor lady!

My brain was still asleep. I desperately tried to wake it up. I can’t even remember what we talked about for ten minutes. She was very sweet and then she left. I think I finally woke up when the door closed. I felt awful for the impression that I made…mental note to go over later and try to look more presentable this time.

Bathroom-sleeper woke up and the rest soon followed, and school resumed. We picked up the house a bit first. (woooow.)

I needed to nurse the baby, so I had my 5-year-old read to me while I did. She crawled in the chair with me while I nursed our big baby. Then the 4-year-old climbed up. We were a cozy group. The baby finally kicked them out. :) The 2-year-old came over and handed me the soggy 1/4 that remained of her cookie. I was hungry. I ate it…not bad.

Everyday we have ASL time (read more about that soon on my Homeschooling blog). It’s always combined with something else, and today it was combined with art time. Normally fine, but some genius of a teacher also planned red paint into art time today. Oh wait, that was me.

So there I am, trying to show the girls in sign what to do with their red finger-paint. The imagination can fill in the rest there, especially since the sign for “red” involves touching your face with your index finger, which I had just dipped into the paint.

It was a very colorful and giggly ASL/art time, and when we cleaned up, I just hugged them. :) I love my girls.

I came out to take a minute to play the piano. It was a fun little break. Then I heard a crash. I ran into the girl’s room to see the baby’s playpen completely upside-down, and all four girls trapped underneath it. I exclaim and ran in to free them from the cage, when the 5-year-old stops me.

“Mom, it’s our tent.”

“Your tent?”

“Yes. We want to be under here. We’re camping.” :)

And that brings us to now. The giggle-fest is going on in the next room and I can’t wait to see what happens next. :)

They just came out to show me how they’ve changed clothes. Again. I forgot to write about that, but that’s for another day. :)

The 4-year-old is taking pictures of the 2-year-old making crazy faces. They can’t stop giggling. :)

My Love will be home soon, and though I am still yogurt and booger covered, I know he’ll run through the door, pick me up and kiss me. I Love him with everything I have, and I love my life. :)

Blessed am I among women, and I know it.

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PS – He just got home. He laughed out loud when he saw me, and then he kissed me. :)

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Later addition — in Matt’s defense, he wasn’t laughing at me, just with me. I can’t blame him…the hair was pretty bad. It’s the next day and it still hasn’t recovered. :) Anyway…Love that man!! :)

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MUCH later addition — my new neighbor has not given up on me and has become one of the dearest people I know out here. It’s taught me not to be too embarrassed to try again with someone, even if you make a stupid first impression, like I so often do.

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