Cornbread Messes...

I am crying over cornbread.  Seriously.  I am sitting on the dining room floor, with a broom in one hand and a dustpan in the other, crying.  Tears are streaming down my face.  I am sobbing faster than I can breathe.  I am looking around the room thinking, "I can't do this anymore.  I can't stand it.  It's not fair.  All I do is work and clean.  Everything is for the kids.  EVERYTHING.  And this is what I get."  As I weep, my tears disappear into the sea of cornbread scattered around the room.  "Cornbread.  Why did I make cornbread?  Am I crazy?  Oh my God, I'm CRAZY now, too!!!  I am losing it!  What is the matter with me?"  (You are laughing, I know, cause you've been there.  Maybe it was toothpaste or Kool-aid or pop tart, but you've been there- the breaking point, where you cry so you don't kill anybody.) I start to get up realizing that wet cornbread is harder to clean up than dry cornbread, so I am in fact making life harder by crying over the mess- meant in  literal and otherwise terms there!  Cornbread is everywhere.  Three pieces of cornbread.  Three little girls.  "My dining room looks as if SPD just dusted for fingerprints on a quadruple homicide."  I giggled as I thought that thought because it was preceded by, "I could kill them.  I could just kill them." (Not meant in the literal sense here!)  Not only was cornbread covering the table, but every chair, corner, and crevice lay covered in cornbread as well.  So I swept and swept before I realized, "Duh, you should have wiped the table off first, genius!  Oh my gosh, I'm a moron now, too!  These kids are making me stupid!"  More sobbing here.  I know what you are thinking.  Where are the kids?  Why aren't they helping clean up the mess they made playing with the cornbread?  But I am way too much of a control freak to let them try to clean up cornbread mess (seriously, have you cleaned up cornbread before?  moist, yet crumbly...) And of course the whole "I could kill them" thing.  They are old enough to clean up.  My 9 year old could have decently removed a large chunk of the mess with a broom.  My 6 year old could have wiped the table off well enough to knock it all off on the floor.  But it still would have left a lot of cornbread, and I was having my whole little meltdown anyway. So it was safer for them to be banished for my little clean up tirade anyway!  Stop laughing at me and my mess of a life.  This little charade was the icing on the cake of my day, I can promise you. But I am coming to figure out that life is messy.  I know. I know. Common cliche used to define many a good tale, and maybe your mess is as mine is more literal than rhetorical, but still messy just the same.  I used to think that messy was miserable.  Messy meant that I wasn't living up to any expectation, much less the mountain-sized expectation I set for myself.  But lately I am realizing that messy IS life.  Without mess, life is boring and predictable (which granted, I could use a little bit more of).  Life without mess is life without a story to tell... and where would anyone be without a good book?!  Where would I be on a warm summer afternoon curled up on my bed if no one else had a messy life that they were willing to turn into a good story?  Bored?  Possibly.  Much cleaner house? Definitely.  Happy?  Never. I knew I needed to share my mess when I realized that my mess really is the story of my life.  And my mess is hilarious!  Those rugrats...I swear!

Princess Laura...

If only I could tell you that Laura has been betrothed to a handsome young prince... or at least won a beauty pageant, but alas that is NOT how she earned her title today!  I came in and went straight to the computer as I had some bills to enter into "bill pay" on my account.  It didn't take long, but as I turned to get up I noticed Laura down on her knees in the dining room licking shredded cheese off the floor.  I shrieked in horror, which caused her to pause in turn and to look up at me with cheese still stuck on her face.  I told her to get up, quick, and go wash her face and hands!  Oh, the germs!  I was saying, "Oh my Goodness, Laura, you will get the flu again or worse from licking the floor."  As she gets up and walks off with that sullen, pitiful, about to cry look, I notice as she walks that there is a trail of cheese from where she was on the floor into her bedroom, bathroom, sister's room, and kitchen!  I hollered at her, "Laura, what in the world were you thinking, baby!  Why is there cheese ALL OVER MY HOUSE??!!!"  To which she so quietly, with her voice choking replied, "I wanted to eat like Princess!"  Princess, of course, being her new puppy.  OH LORD!!  I sat her down and talked to her about germs and the terrible mess it made, not to mention the expense of shredded cheese.  Then I looked at her and asked, "Does Princess eat her food in a trail?"  Then she said, "Well, Nonnie lets her puppies eat all the food under the table."  How do you argue with that?  So I spent the next ten minutes sweeping up an entire bag of shredded cheese off my floors.  I suppose you could look at it like I killed two birds.  (I always need to sweep!)  It's just too bad that I panicked and didn't let her continue to eat long enough to take some pictures!  Gross, I know.  And don't worry, I got to mop less than 30 minutes later when I dropped the kool-aid pitcher in the middle of the kitchen.  And that one was all my fault, folks!  No blaming the rugrats that time!  So a good sweepin' and moppin' later...Those rugrats, I swear!

New Chore Charts...

A long while back we did the whole chore chart thing.  Well, to say the least, it was time to reimplement.  So I called the girls over to the computer and let them pick out pictures for their own chore chart. I also printed off a list of "recommended" chores for their ages.  Then I called a family meeting!  We all sat down and discussed how mommy was going crazy and how we all needed to pitch in to help her around the house! (Ok, we really just talked about how we could all help each other!  But we all know the truth!  hah!)  We started with Laura's age group by reading the chores that were recommended and asking her if she thought any of those things were things she would like to help the family out with!  She picked out a few, and I picked out a few to round out her list.  Then we repeated the process with each of the others!  Then we discussed what they thought were fair rewards.  They said they didn't know with homework if they could do some things every night, so we agreed that if they completed all of their chores for 5 out of the 7 days they would receive a small treat- like an Icee or a mini blizzard.  We will keep chore charts that they receive a treat for and when they have 4 charts (4 weeks worth) they will receive a fun time out with someone on the farm.  Maggie said she wants Sho Sho to take her out to eat and Ann Cherie wants Dada to take her shooting.  Laura just said "Yay" so I'm not sure what her date will be!  lol  So far- SUCCESS!  I have not gone to bed in tears in almost a week now and my house no longer looks as if it has the flu (well, don't check the corners!)  So I say, even if this week was magical and never repeats, it was totally worth it!  Those little rugrats reformed....so far!

New jeans...

So I am taking off my jeans and Ann Cherie says, "Momma, you need to go back to the Buckle and get you some more jeans." so I said, "why?" and she says, "Because you are about to grow out of yours!" She really wasn't being ugly! That was the funniest part! She just knows that's what I say to her when hers are getting "too tight!" Time to go back on the diet!

Buggy Mayhem...

You just have to love the little miniature buggies at Tom's Market! They make LOTS of noise, and there are just enough (3) of them for each of my children to get to push one! Laura and her buggy would qualify for Nascar! Enough said. Ann Cherie looks out of place without her calculator the way she is questioning and checking prices of different foods and reasoning aloud as to why she NEEDS to buy some pizzas to feed her "Dada" on the snow day as she places them in her buggy after pausing patiently for me to respond positively to said reasoning. Maggie on the other hand is a quiet, yet calculative sneak. She is placing items of her interest in each of the buggies equally so as not to overfill her own and give away her quest to buy everything with sugar/ sodium available to purchase in the store. Anyway, my stop for milk became a $50 snow day restock! I am now suffering from the whole "my house on the flu" visions... Those rugrats, I swear!

Cactus love...

I love it when my cactus blooms! They are gorgeous flowers! It reminds me of the prickly parts of life and how they suddenly will bloom just like the cactus! I count my blessings when I see the beauty these typically ugly plants produce!

My house has the flu...

Yeah, we sorta bathed the living contents of the room each day and then put them back in to keep them sane during the week in the house! I don't know which was worse, the kids feeling terrible with the flu or the girls' room looking terrible while they had the flu. Anyway! Nothing a lot of laundry detergent, a good sweeping and mopping, and lots of clorox spray couldn't restore! Those rugrats, I swear!