Thursday, November 19, 2009

My greatest flaw

I know, it's hard to believe, but I do possess some imperfections. Perhaps the most embarrassing and most obvious flaw I have is my lack of tidiness, er cleanliness, um ability to pick up after myself, eesh, I am basically a down right slob. Seriously. I have read the Messy Manuals, self help on learning how to de-clutter and clean, made vows to myself, lived with roommates that forced me to clean, I have even gone so far as to schedule visits with people so that I am forced to clean up, but alas, I still seriously lack the clean gene.

Enter the magic of friends. I know I have blogged on this before, but it's worth repeating. My friends are awesome. I have always had someone who could help me clean. My BFF as a child cleaned for me, my sister cleaned when we shared a room, my college roommate (couldn't have done college without her) kept our room tidy all four years, and well, my husband has seriously failed in this department. He is just as big a slob as I am. I am grateful that here in TX I have found my enabler, a hem, clean friend. We have worked out a deal, she and I. She cleans my house in a way that I couldn't even envision and I pay her. So far so good.

Seriously guys, we spent all of last night cleaning the upstairs and the kids' rooms. I mean we organized, we unearthed, and we cleaned. But apparently Brenda (clean friend) went into their rooms and created some sort of magic. The kids walked into their rooms with oohs and ahhs. Jacob was so excited he called me into his room so I could see how, "she made my bed!" For real. I spent nearly an hour on our art table that seemed just as bad as when I started. She spent 10 minutes over there and it looks like an organized studio. I could hate her for her clean brilliance.

So, for a few minutes tonight, I am sitting back and enjoying my clean house. Just a few minutes though because I think we were already on our way back to our previous state the minute I let the 3 shedding dogs back in the house.

And this is just a picture of my adorable children from like 4.5 years ago because I don't actually have any photographic evidence of my clean house. It does exist though, for now.

Sunday, November 15, 2009

Sarah and Brian + 8

Okay, so first of all, Brian would like to know where our TLC contract is. Second of all, all 8 kids are not ours really, so you can all breathe a sigh of relief - we have not lost our minds, totally. We did, however, have 8 children here overnight and all day today between our two biological children, our two foster children and my friend's four kids (the ones that lived with us this summer). Regardless of how you count it up, 8 is still a lot of kids.

When you have 8 kids you might miss that one of your kids is wearing a sleeveless sundress in the middle of November. Or you might not see that one child has his dress shirt on inside out and even managed to button it that way. If you had 8 kids one of them might have lice and you might have to go to Walmart at 11pm to get lice shampoo so that you can de-louse all of them - lots of lice shampoo by the way. When you have 8 kids probably 2 or more of them could be getting into trouble without you seeing it until it was too late and someone might have already called someone else stupid or something worse. When you have 8 kids you might banish 3 boys to the backyard for-some-peace-and-quiet-for-crying-out-loud, and they may or may not string the hose up over the jungle gym and try and use it as a tight rope to the deck. When you have 8 kids you might have to do like 500 loads of laundry even using your new giant size super sweet LG washing machine and dryer. When you have 8 kids probably a few of them will spill at each meal. When you have 8 kids, more than likely 3 of them will hate whatever it is you made for the meal that the other ones spilled something at. When you have 8 kids you have to take two cars to church - even though you have one of those nifty SUVs that has a 3rd row that seats 3 - unless of course your vehicle is bright yellow and seats 70. When you have 8 kids the gate you installed to keep the little ones off the stairs and the big ones upstairs might end up broken by one or the other going over it. When you have 8 kids and they all are asleep, you probably will be drinking a BIG glass of wine and writing a really long blog post about it.