Remember this post?

It gets better.

Late Sunday night… a week and a half ago now…
John and I went to double-check on the boys before we went to sleep.
Gotta shoo away any bad dreams hiding in corners, you know.
Turn fans to “low” instead of “hurricane” (man, it’s warm here).
Tuck blankets up to cute little chinny chin chins since little boys sometimes forget how warm it is here.
That sort of thing.

We don’t often do that together; usually just one of us will suffice. That night, for whatever reason, we both went in – I was on the “lucky” side as it turned out. My shoulder was practically brushing up against the wall going down the right side of that hallway.

As we turned through the doorway, I thought I saw something out of the corner of my eye.

“What was that?”

(Cue violins …

As I was in the kitchen cleaning up from lunch, I overheard little E singing to himself, to the tune of “If You Chance to Meet a Frown.”  When I looked over, this is what I saw:

His frosting improv cracked me up.

Ah, Mr. Eagle, you do make my world a better place – and you certainly took good care of that sticky pyrex for me, too.…

Once upon a time…

Mrs. Smith learned to make bread operate her bread maker.  She had fun experimenting and tried making plain old whole wheat bread a little more exciting by using an Italian-spices-enhanced macadamia-nut oil in place of butter.

The kingdom rejoiced for it turned out fabulous and garnished their dinner of pasta quite nicely.  Good thing, too, because Mrs. Smith made several loaves. There was quite a bit leftover.

A few days later, she decided to make French toast with strawberry sauce and whipped cream.  Num num.  Her favorite.

Anyone else remembering the Italian spiciness to her bread?  Well, she didn’t really think of that, and…

Turns out pretty much anything tastes yummy when drowning in strawberry sauce and whipped cream.

Even French-Italian toast.  Who knew?

No, really!  It was good!  Maybe not worth repeating, but I don’t think …

And now to share something that makes me giggle every time I think of it.

Our kids were running around with the other 200 kids there. (Okay, so it was more like 30, not 200. Still. That’s a lot of kids.)
Mr. Smith came back with this commentary:

“They’re all playing Harry Potter, waving their wands around at each other, ‘Wingardium leviosa!’ and the like,” then he chuckles, “Our kids don’t know it, so they have no idea what they’re doing.”

I had visions of …

Calling our 17 y.o. neighbor on a Saturday afternoon.

Ring ring ring….

“Hello?”

No one does a suspicious-sounding ‘hello’ like her.  They must have caller-ID.  She always sees me coming.

I respond with my happiest, “Hi Lisa, how’s it going?”

In the same resigned tone I might use to tell Creativity she can’t have brownies for breakfast, Neighbor sighs and answers,

“I know why you’re calling, and I can’t do it.  We have family coming over for dinner tonight…”

Is it just me, or was that really funny?  I had to explain why I was laughing, which only added to the funny-ness, but really.  She knows me too well.  Good help is so hard to find these days.

PS:

I think I need to clarify something, lest you think I was laughing *at* her.  No no no.  I’d never mean to make fun of her, especially on a blog.  I …

6:30pm

John comes home tired from a long afternoon of meeting with people.  The kids bailed the dinner table just a few minutes before, and they are only too happy to maul greet him.

The house is a disaster.  That happens when Mom can’t do anything but lay on the couch all day.

Confession:
Yes, it takes me 6+ hours to recover from 3 hours of church.  It was all I could do to take that leftover casserole out of the fridge, stick it in the oven, and then get it to the table.

On the way back from washing shaking-peoples-hands-germies off, John notices that the chaos only got worse the further he came …

This little monkey man is at the stage most would call “handful.”

How’s that?

Well, let’s just say I discovered this week that he has the amazing ability to turn a bottle of glue into a 35-ft trail across the house… in all of about 30 seconds.  Maybe he needed the trail to find his way back to the sink.  Maybe he was just trying to make it obvious that I really do live in a Family Circus cartoon.

Happily, I also discovered glue cleans up pretty quickly, even off couches.  Thank goodness for small miracles!

The little monkey stinker boy figured out how to climb out of the crib about… oh, 3 months ago, maybe.  This was bad news for bedtime, but good news for Freedom who had definitely outgrown the bassinet. 

My first two kids made the transition out of a crib pretty …

One fit well and was well-loved.  So well loved there came to be big holes over the knees.  The second and third pairs were cute – but didn’t fit so well.  Not really.  Not after four little heirs to the throne came along.

And so the Queen looked in her closet and sent out a proclamation.

“Enough is enough!” she said, “This is silly.  Let these useless old jeans be transformed into a beautiful skirt!”

The great necromancer, Google, was summoned and consulted, but -alas- the Queen was not satisfied.

“No, Google, I don’t want a short skirt!  Short skirts are all but useless with all the little princelings I must constantly chase down and carry.  Show me a pattern for a nice, long skirt.”

But, alas, Google came up empty handed.

Thus it happened that the Queen took matters …

Where it takes you fully 30 minutes to just wake up because you spent all night consoling a sick/in-pain colicy baby?

Where you’re still in your PJ’s at 9:30?  (Ugh!!!)

Where your oldest boy FINALLY follows directions to get dressed for the day… when he changes into his Tae Kwon Do uniform for the class at 3:45?

When it seems like you spend the entire day putting out fires, but get nothing done?

For example…

The kids come rushing into the bathroom (where you were hoping to at last find 30 seconds to yourself.  It is a bathroom, you know…) to let you know that the 2yo broke ALL the eggs.  (Except the hard-boiled ones, of course, they are careful to mention.  Thanks.)

And while you’re cleaning up the mess, the baby wakes up hungry.

And the big  kids are picking fights with …

<I s’pose I already mentioned it in Saturday’s post… but… oh well.  I wrote this first, actually.  And I took no pictures of the mountain we dropped off.  Sorry.>

Turns out, we had enough stuff to fill the back of the minivan to the top!   And you know what?  It was so invigorating, I have lots of energy for dejunking the rest of the house.  At least until the next drop-off.  Funny, how that works now.

Boy, have I come a long way since the nervous, “Oh, I just can’t bear to let all this go but I guess I will for the good of humanity and the sake of finding floor in the play room, but but but…”

Ha!

What was I afraid of? Getting arrested? …