....who have never experienced raw egg salad decorating your dining room:
....who have never had to explain to six children why they couldn't go play on their brand new playset on a 70 degree sunny day because of a temporary bee swarm 10 feet away from the monkey bars:
just cannot fathom being a parent of a large family. But when you see all the kiddies with their hair actually brushed and their shoes on the right feet-which believe me is a rare thing, not to mention clothes right-side-out!- you all say "Awwwwwwwww...They're so cute and well-behaved!" To you I raise my eyebrow and choke back a snort. They are evil minion, these children. This house is overcrowded! These behinds are too big for their britches! The attitudes! The language! The defiance! It's almost like they're..........WEEDS!!!!
Wow.
Makes you cock your head to the side and think, at least it does me. Weeds? Kids? Hmph... But I don't have to yell at the garden, you say. I don't have to hand out a whoopin' to those dandelions. And the weeds and plants don't draw on the walls or spill koolaid on the fresh tablecloth or find my keys, sneak into my room and steal the baggie from the hardware store that has cabinet hinges in it!!! Wait....I'm getting side-tracked now, and I believe I am onto something here, so bear with me.
Perhaps we should grow our children as we grow our garden, with patience and with love (sans the Roundup, of course). Maybe we are growing something beautiful and have failed to notice. All the picking, the cleaning, the rearranging, the folding, the transplanting, the mending, the construction, the reconstruction....they have kept us so busy that we have missed the complexity of what is truly happening around us. Sure as I write this there is raw egg on the dining room floor and on the wadded up tablecloth in the hallway hamper....there's a muddy bulldozer in the middle of my living room...but my children went to bed happy and I KNEW ABOUT IT! I really did! I did not yell at them to go to sleep, I hugged each and every one of them and went over highlights of the day with each and every one of them.
And all six smiled. Well, Nathan made a fishy face and kissed me with his boogery little lips, but that's just as good as a smile, right?
The garden will always be here, whether it changes its look makes no difference, it will still be my garden. The children, these half-dozen hoodlums that we have grown will be here as well-though hopefully they will move out and find their own job and apartment when it is time...But as a seedling tree will only become tall and gangly and drop limbs all over your front yard someday, you must still nurture it when it is young. You must water it and feed it and support its awkward, annoying early years. Because as a gardener, that is what you do.
So I will love you, my children...evil, filthy, loud demons that you are. I will forgive you the peanut butter rubbed on the siding and the hamster loose in the kitchen. I will TRY not to yell and make that vein in my head pulse, because it really takes much too much wine now to make all that stop...And I will enjoy you. I will enjoy your everchanging, evergrowing, sometimes challenging little minds. And if you happen to overcrowd me too much with all your shenanigans, I shall warn you that I will be giving you away with the spare iris and daylilies!
I often hear this admonishment whenever I lament my parenting woes to others. I'm not sure that these folks realize how alienating this truly is. Do they not realize that parents with only two or three children can be just as miserable some days? Do the parents of an only child not have moments that they would love to jump inside the television's Toy Story and zoom to Infinity and Beyond? How is it that having a half-dozen hoodlums makes us deserving of doom and chaos? Could I ask anymore questions? I'm sure that I could, but I'll try to refrain from sounding three.
While we're on the topic of three, let's talk about this morning. I awoke and was informed of something that had been done to Dad's Chair (TM). Dad's Chair (TM) is part of a ridiculously expensive-though quite the deal- sectional/recliner package that we purchased from Sofa Mart. It is microfiber. Microfiber was invented for mothers, I am here to testify of the ease that one can simply clean any stain, be it snot, peanut butter, crayon, Sunny D, pee, or whatever-it-was-that-I-had-in-my-pocket that fell out and got squished. Now on occasion I have taken to using the hair dryer to blow-dry a damp, cleaned section of couch...briefly. Works like a charm.
I cleaned the couch yesterday.
I did not put the hair-dryer away.
There is a hair-dryer sized hole melted into Dad's Chair (TM).
"Ali did it!" My darling Three year old who most days only answers by "Princess" and is NOT 'gorgeous,' but rather "BOOOOOTIPUL."
"Oh she did?" Commence rubbing her nose in it and swatting her on the butt, sending her to her room, like a puppy with tail between her legs.
Not even a half hour later, they start sneaking to me in the kitchen, first Jo, then Max, then Ali herself. "Kayleigh really did it, Mom." "Mom, Kayleigh made us say that Ali did it so she wouldn't get the pants beat off of her." And then Ali...Boootipul Princess Ali came to me with her big blue eyeballs and pretty blond hair and says "Mom...I nuh do. Dabin tow Taywee to do it." Gavin and Kayleigh....of course.
I could go on and on about who did or did not do it and how we all decided who did it, and why the hell didn't the younger kids throw Kayleigh under the bus to begin with? She IS the mean biggest sister...Sibling logic is lost on me. Point here being, I was forced to stray from my projects in order to fix Dad's Chair (TM) before dad woke up... Thankfully I found a patch, and did NOT iron it on, thank you, but used some self-adhesive fabric tape-which I also got wrapped around my hands and in the carpet and all over Alison as well. Let's just say, it sticks.
The patch is a peace sign, and while it sickens me to know that I have already had to mend a not even month old piece of furniture, it IS awful cute. Or was..........until Nathan chewed the darn thing off and ran away cackling to climb onto the dining room table where he could stomp and dance and growl at those of us below.
I know, I know...I probably shouldn't be whining about my day to anyone. I'm the one who wanted six kids. But I'm not complaining, I just have to share. It is a rare day that I meet anyone with six children, and if I can spread the word about what happens in our house just think of all the money people will spend on birth control! We're a walking Trojan commercial-Forget her pleasure, what about her sanity?!
And speaking of insane, I took them to the store today. What a wild bunch we must have looked like with me calling out things like "Gavin, Blue Bonnet! Kayleigh, cinnamon rolls! Max, get your hands off that! Jolie do you have to pee?" And our vision could not be complete without Bootipul Princess sitting in the cart on her Mountain Dew Case throne. A young man passed me in the Giant Pickle (TM) aisle and actually backed up to speak to me. His face was drawn into that classic panic of a fresh twenty-something father-his eyes wide and bloodshot, stubble on his cheeks, hair sticking out from his head like he'd been electrocuted, and I noticed different colored socks. "Ma'am? Are all of these children yours?" **EYE ROLL** "Well yes, but I may leave some of them here in the Giant Pickle (TM) aisle if they don't start acting like sweet little human beings instead of Pickle Monsters" I said with a grin. "Well my wife and I just had our first baby, and I don't know how to do it, but you're doing this...wow. You're so blessed...bless you...this is amazing." Now I know that he was delusional from 934 hours without sleep and new baby and blah, blah, blah that any of you who DIDN'T want six kids would try to reduce the compliment with, but there are some of you that know... Words like these make us stop and look at the Bootipul Disasters that we have created, and for approximately 2 nanoseconds we forget that our new couches have melty holes in them, their shoes are on backwards, and that one of them is wearing her clothes inside out because what Princess says GOES...and we say Poop On You, People Who Say 'Well You Wanted All Those Kids!' We are LUCKY enough to have all these kids! You wish that you could have such a glorious bounty of children running amok in your home! You envy my frizzy-up-in-a-clippy hair and my baggy sweatshirt that smells like laundry that sat in the washer too long before it was put in the dryer! Annnnnd then we come back to reality which is, believe it or not, conveniently located in the wine aisle and served best chilled...
So I have been a busy little lady here today. I have seven nights off from healing the broken, the sickly, and the loony. SEVEN! Do you have any idea what I can accomplish in a time frame like that? Well I'm here to show and tell what has occured on Day Two.
Adam and I went to his sister's house this last weekend and saw the Best Contraption Ever (TM). The kitchen trash can was one of those fantabulous Rev-A-Shelf inside the cabinet, hidden away from everything trash cans. Amazing. I have seen them before, but never in action and I am here to say: GREAT. The kids were so impressed that they were actually finding things to throw away! So a trip to Menards and Four Screws later...Awesome!
And there has been an issue here lately of little children attempting to tie every cord that is connected to the computer in precisely 87 knots apiece and coloring on the monitor with orange and green crayons. While I am a fan of art I prefer it on paper...and not the mail that I have on the desk. We have been wanting to put the computer in our room for safe keeping and peace of mind, but our desk is too large. The hunt for a desk that will fit where we want it to has been futile to this point. And then today at Menards-you save big money there, you know...when you shop Menards? Even Nathan was singing the song by aisle 836. I found a desk that will suit our needs perfectly. There is something equally frustrating and satisfying about building your own fake wood furniture. Something that makes you sigh, scream, curse, and finally lie in a defeated heap on the floor and weep... But then you end up with something that actually passes as furniture!
BRILLIANT!
Then I decided to tackle the children's bathroom, pina colada in hand, after they went to bed. It seems that the remodel of 2010 did not want to last very long. Rather, I don't know how to clean up after myself, so the kids found the primer hidden in the cabinet and sprinkled it on the beautiful black bathroom furniture...meh. And the wall paper that I painstakingly hung has suffered too many toothpaste and crayon smears, splotches of 'what-the-heck-IS-that,' and is now rendered yucky. What is my solution, you wonder? Tile. You can scrub it. Is there anything left to say?
This of course is only the beginning. I have also bought paint to refinish a furniture piece for the girls' room, and hardware for the kitchen cabinets, and rollers to finish painting the cabinets, and replacement doors for the broken kitchen cabinets. I intend on repainting the children's bathroom furniture and rehanging their mirror. I also have to write my last paper for this term of my BSN degree. But most importantly, I have a date with a pretty neat guy, my husband. We're going to the home show-isn't that romantic? I figure that it may give me a few more project ideas...
