Ways to Know You are One Sick Mommy

1. You do not make it out of bed until afternoon.
2. The house looks trashed (and not cause you had a busy week and were not home but because you were home CONSTANTLY!)
3. School has not been done in over a week.
4.You find your toddler eating a tortilla off a $100 CD and simply tell him to eat at the table and take away his"plate."
5. You even think of the $100 CD as a "plate" of sorts.
6 Your child is foraging and eating said tortillas and you slightly admire his resourcefulness and wonder if this because he is the fourth.
7. You would gladly trade this cough for just about any other ailment except throwing up.
8. You are praying to be hospitalized.
9. You broke down and turned on the heater because after having 3 layers on the botton 4 layers on top 3 comforters on top of you and two warm (HOT) bodies sleeping next to you, you are STILL FREEZING.
10. Not even 1 hour after you broke down and turned the heat on you have now shed all of your layers except a pair of pants and a t-shirt and wonder if you should turn the heat off even though it is 50 degrees in the house.
11. You are still in the same outfit as 2 days ago.
12. You begin to look up how many joints are in a human body because you are pretty sure you can point to all of them since they all ache like there is no tomorrow.
13. Your children have now figured out that since you are sick they can pretty much do what ever they want since you do not have the energy to properly guide them and have resorted to only trying to keep them alive until you recover.
14. You have lost your voice or try to only talk when some emergency is happening (Because otherwise it would hurt too much to be worth it).
15. The headache that started 3 days ago now seems like an annoying friend that will not go away.
16. You sleep on the couch not because you are mad at your other but so he can deal with the children that always wind up in your bed.
17. You are the new playground equipment since you have take up residence on the couch and are trying to move as little as possible.
18 You are down medications to try and see if something, anything might take the edge off and let you at least function in Zombie State.
19. You would actually prefer Zombie State to the current state you are in.
20.You are seriously considering drugging your children so they will sleep more so you can go back to sleep.

Taggy!

My little one is obsessed with tags. The last three kids have all been blanket kids, Jeremiah called it a Blanky, and Matthew called it a Dede. (Don't ask me.) Seth liked the tag on his blanket and rubbed it while he was going to sleep. In fact, he rubbed it so much that he rubbed the tag right off! Because of the lack of tag he no longer likes that blanket and has moved on to just about anything with a tag. He will rub the tag on blankets, jackets, shirts (his own and his brother's even while they are wearing them!), even car seats! His favorite for the time being is my husband's and my down comforter. Let's just say we no longer have claim to it. He will drag it out just so he can cuddle with the other or I. When my other started having to find it for him, so he could go to bed and he would giggle and laugh, the nickname started. He is now "Taggy!"

You!

Seth rarely says his name. He knows his name since he responds when we call him but when we were looking at pictures and I was trying to get him to identify himself in a picture. (Just because we haven't had a camera for quite some time doesn't mean we do not have any pictures of him just not that many since they have been take with other people's cameras and on our cell phones.)

I pointed to a picture on my phone and asked "Who is that Sethy?"

To which he promptly and enthusiastically responded, "You!"

"That's me?" (I am wondering if he was being silly.)

"No, you!"

"That's Mommy?"

"NO, YOU!!"

"OHH, that's you!"

"Yeah, YOU!" (DUH, MOMMY! is what I am sure is going through his head.)

Suffice to say we have not worked on pronouns with the little one yet.

How many cars?

My boys have been having a hard time keeping their room clean lately. In one of the many tense discussions, on how to rectify the situation, I suggested taking all the toys and moving them into our garage. I asked Seth how many cars he needed to keep happy (since those are his latest passion.)

Me- "Seth you only need what 5 cars to keep you occupied, right?"

Seth- "and a truck."

Me (trying my hardest not to laugh) "5 cars and a truck to keep you happy?"

Seth happily shouting-"YEAH!"

The discussion was temporarily shelved due to everyone busting out laughing!

Lost Child

My dad has been working on getting our fence back up. We are pet sitting soon and would like the comfort of having a fence to make sure she does not wander away. That being said I would like a fence to make sure my own children do not wander away. After an afternoon of putting up posts, my dad called it a day and put his tools away so he could head home and get ready to go to Lake Tahoe. I rounded up the children while he was doing this herded them into the house and said good-bye. After he drove off, I went to check on Matthew who I had heard playing in his bedroom but had not seen for awhile and just to reassure myself that I did indeed know where he was I walked back to the boys bedroom. I glanced in to see what he was doing, but no Matthew, I started calling for him while walking around the house. No Matthew. I walked outside and called for him still no response. By this time the other boys are calling for him too. Still no Matthew. I sent Jeremiah inside to look behind their loft bed, in closets, basically any nook or cranny in our small house. I had Erik go search the backyard and garage while I started walking toward the duplexes that are beside our house. I called my dad now starting to get upset and told him to come back because I could not find Matthew. He agreed and turned around. About a 30 seconds went by and he called back. "I have him. He crawled into his car seat and I did not even notice him." My husband chose this moment to call and was told the tale as my dad drove back to my home. As best as I can guess, Matthew had come out of the house after I had herded him and his brothers in and had gotten into my dad's car so he could go back to Mamma's and Papa's. I asked him why he did that and his response was "I didn't want to be with you anymore." From the mouths of babes...

Specifics

Today I am reminded about how important it is in our household not to be vague. We try to be very specific when we instruct or discipline our children. This is partly due to the stunts that my husband and I remember being pulled in our childhood. My brother and I were very logical and used to think about the wording of punishments to see how we could manipulate them but not disobey. For example: When I was about 12, I got into trouble for coming home late. My mom punished me and said I could not go play with my friends since I could not not keep track of time. I took that to mean I could not go to their houses so I proceeded to play with my friends in my yard. I know that she probably meant that I was not supposed to play with them at all but she was not specific and so I chose to use that to my advantage, my poor mother (just as a side note, I have apologized countless times for my behavior growing up.) Well, it is now coming full circle. I just told one of my children to go sit on his bed until I called for him and if I saw him playing with one toy (Their bedroom and playroom are one in the same now.) his hand would get spanked along with his bottom. (Trust me, it has been a long day/week/month.) My husband quickly called out, "And she did not ONLY mean you cannot play with one toy. You cannot play with any toy or toys." I smiled to myself as I realized the now obvious ambiguousness of my statement. I knew if I was said child I would have reasoned my antics away by stating, "I did not disobey. I did not play with one toy but with toys." The joys of raising reasoning, logical children. Thankfully my husband was there to immediately clarify.

Cheap Entertainment!

Okay from my limited experience, toddlers take pleasure in the simplest of things. Each of my children for the first 2 sometimes 3 Christmases found more pleasure playing with a box than the actual toys. In this vein, another very simple/inexpensive, can even be made at home for cheaper, source of amusement for toddlers, and most preschoolers too, is BUBBLES! My 2-year-old found a small bottle of bubbles in a box of stuff brought in to be put away from cleaning out the garage. He immediately tore off the wrapper and brought it to me to open up. We proceeded to play with it for the next 5 minutes until i put the lid back on so I could go back to folding laundry. He promptly took the lid off and in his zest to stomp a bubble ended up spilling the bottle. Thankfully it cost me about 5 cents so other than needing to quickly clean up the spill off the Pergo no big deal. By the way I am still very thankful for our lack of carpeting in the house. It is so much easier to maintain. The bubble mixture wiped right up and Seth very quickly found another bottle of bubbles. This time I will be putting it up so we can keep it for more than 5 minutes.

Note: Before I could get to him he spilled that bottle too!

Exercising

I was given an elliptical by some neighbors of my MIL who were moving. They did not use it and were wondering if I wanted it. Definitely!! I have been wanting one for quite some time over 3 years to be more precise. Now to make sure I use it and it did not wind up sitting in my house like it did in theirs. In order to do that, I challenged my oldest to getting our exercise in everyday. We put our letter on the calendar after we exercise to keep track. It is working. I am probably being premature but it is Day 4 and I have upped my time and have not skipped one day. I cannot let my nine-year-old show me up!

The Tale of a Reformed Messy Garage

I need to clean out my garage.

Really Bad!!

I cannot walk through it anymore.

The garage cleaning fairy has not visited.

I have been putting it off all summer because it was too hot.

It is now fall and the garage still needs attention.

It has to winterized (our garage floods in any big rainstorm) or I will lose lots of important items. Things that I did not know were pertinent until I have to get rid of them due to water damage, mold, mildew etc.

The garage fairy keeps rescheduling.

Now we have had two rainstorms.

The garage still needs to be cleaned.

Sigh.

I don't want to clean the garage and I do not feel good but...Hooray! We cleaned the front part of it today. By we I mean I conned my closet friend with pizza into helping. (I think she would have done it without the bribe of pizza since she is so nice but it did help that we did not have our minions constantly reminding us that they were going to die of immanent starvation.) We had 8 children running wild while she helped me sort through the stuff that has been accumulating since I moved. This includes the stuff I was going to try selling though a garage sale (That turned out to be the saddest garage sale ever.) and all the boxes that were destroying the ambiance of my front room right after I moved. (I had to get them out of my house before I went crazy!) We got it down to about 3 boxes and ignored the back half that we could not access due to my dad's tools being on top of my stuff. (In his defense, there was no place to put them since my garage has not had a walking path since the first week my boys put their bikes away. In my defense, the tools were only supposed to be stored that way for a couple of days so I could clean out that part of the garage.)

I am happy to say that the front part of the garage is now clean, winterized and there is a very clear walking path.

WOO-HOO!!!

Now I need to clean my house.

Do you know how fast 8 kids can destroy a house when there is not any adult supervision?

UPDATE:

11/13/2010

I cleaned out the back half of the garage made a walkway, a place for the boys bikes, organized their toys, found a spot for my husbands papers, put everything that could be susceptible to water damage up on pallets or shelves and even designated a nice place for my dad to store his tools while he finishes my fence.

It looks WOW!

I wonder how long until it will need to cleaned again. Probably as most things in this house, way too soon.

BTW do you know how fast 4 boys with very little adult supervision can tear apart a house?

Halloween

When did Halloween turn into a weekend event? asked my husband after we attended the third event this weekend. My MIL kindly responded, "When you met Beth." It is true. I like to socialize maybe too much. I commit to too many things because I want my boys to have fun and then end up making my life stressful because we are racing to do everything. That being said we did not go to the seven events that I had planned and only went to three. I would share pictures of how adorable my children looked in their matching costumes but one of the costumes was not shipped so we had to scramble at the last minute and instead of having 3 Star Wars Shadow Clone Troopers we were going to have a battle with between 2 Star Wars Shadow Clone Troopers and a Star Wars Clone Trooper. Then said child randomly found a Optimus Prime Helmet in the garage so he decided he was going to wear that instead. We also had the the cutest lamb you ever saw. He was a baaaa baaaaby. The awesome picture never was taken since we still do not have a working camera and are waiting until the after Thanksgiving sale to buy one. The boys had a great time and only one boy was lost for 20 minutes and found happily going down the slide at a bounce house having no knowledge he was lost. Those of you who know the boys will know without being said who this child was since he is the wanderer in the family. I hope all had a very Happy Halloween!