War Paint

As I was getting dinner ready this evening, the boys began to trickle down from their upstairs activities.  First came Ben, then Mitchell, then... well... that was it.  Jack never trickled.

After a while, my curiosity got the better of me (plus it was time for dinner), so I went up to investigate.  I found him in my bathroom.  alone. Never a good sign.

Guesses?

I found him with two tubes of mascara, globby wand in each hand, brushing his hair and painting his face like war paint.  He grinned at me and said, "Look mom!  It's pretty like you!"

We let him wear it for dinner.  Nothing like giggling boys to make dinner stretch on even longer, but it was worth it.  He is a stinker... but hilarious.

Dad!!!

I am doing things a bit opposite with Jack than I did with my older boys. Both my older two were sleeping in "big boy beds" before they were potty trained. As I don't need the crib for a new baby and I am not moving at the moment, I am in no hurry to move Jack out of the confines of his crib. So although he is potty trained, he is not able to get himself up in the morning to take care of business.

What does he do about this?

Well, since I was gone all weekend, Jack became quite attached to and used to his dad, so when he wakes up and needs to do his duty, he immediately starts yelling, "Dad!! Dad!! I need you! Come through my door! Open it! I'm ready to get up! Get me out of bed! Dad!! I need to poop! Dad!! Poop!" For those Will Ferrell fans out there, picture him yelling "Mom! Meatloaf!" and you will get the idea.

I love that he calls for dad now. It's too cute. I also love that he no longer wants to poop in his pants. However, I don't always love to rush into his room immediately after he wakes up at 6am. I miss the days when he would wake up, poop in his diaper, not care, and just sing and play and talk leisurely in his bed.

So what does he do now that mom is back on duty and dad isn't rushing in first thing in the morning? Well, he doesn't want to poop in his diaper, so this morning, after calling for dad and telling him he had to poop and no one showed up, he took his diaper off and pooped in his crib!

I heard that all on the monitor as well. "Dad! I need to poop! Dad! I'm pooping! Dad! I'm making a mess mess mess! Help, Dad!"

I really have no one to blame but myself. I am the one who keeps him trapped in his cage and I am the one who ignored his pleas for help. It is only fair that I am the one who had to wash him, his clothes, his sheet, his blankets, his giant stuffed dog, and his bibi.

As I was cleaning Jack up, he looked at me accusingly and said, "Mom, I needed dad! I pooped!" Glad Jack at least is blaming someone else...

The Christmas Room

I know many of you love Christmas decorations. You love to get the boxes out as early as you can and for a month, (or more for some of you if you can manage it somehow) you love seeing your house covered from top to bottom in lights, flowers, wreaths, reindeer, candles, trees, fake snow, snow globes, santas, snowmen, and all manner of twinkly, fragrant, red, green, gold, and silver decorations.

I am not one of those people. I am, unfortunately, a bit... decorationally-challenged. I love to see someone else's beautiful home decorated well. I actually like tasteful outdoor decoration (when I say tasteful, anything that requires its own pump to keep it up is most definitely NOT included!) And I have a handful of items I love inside my house: a tree and my nativity set are the main ones.

But in my own home, most Christmas decoration is just festive clutter - something else to buy and dust and straighten. I, find myself cringing as I pull out the boxes thinking, "Man... where in the world am I going to put this stuff that will be out of the way, won't tempt little fingers to explore it, and won't tempt me to clean the house every single day?" And I have to put it all away again in a month!

This year, I found the perfect solution! We decided to put up our tree in a room that was formerly the "fort room." This room has not been used for anything really since the boxes were finally all flattened and stored. But we did some rearranging and now this room has some comfy furniture, a beautiful Christmas tree, and almost ALL my decorations! Christmas kinda threw up in there!

I love this solution because it gives us a Christmasy place to enter when needing a little bit more Christmas in our day. The boys love it because it is how they would love EVERY room to look!

We are suddenly moving our favorite books in there and there is now a bin of blocks in there. Ben does his daily reading curled up under a blanket in there. The ornaments on the tree have become their new favorite toys and they all have names and occupations and keep having tree climbing contests (the ornaments, not the boys.)

I am so thankful to be in this house and be able to have an out-of-the-way-yet-still-convenient room to make-over in this way. And I have to say, we are all having so much fun with the Christmas room, I find the decorations slowly leaking out of there and finding homes in other rooms. Perhaps the joy it all brings my boys is worth the inconvenience of clutter for me.

And candles really are pretty...

Lazy Mommy and The Car That's Always There

I am not a messy person. I like things clean and neat. I like the house to smell clean and I hate the toilet seat left up. I clean at least one of my toilets every day (I have a lot of toilets and a lot of boys to.. well... do what boys do.) My bed is only unmade if I am in it and I make my boys make theirs as well. I sweep my kitchen after lunch and dinner every day and even spent all last Saturday washing the entire ground floor windows of my house using a squeegee and a huge, shaky ladder and a very *helpful* 4 year old climbing up behind me.

That said, I am not a neat freak. I don't mop every day and sometimes I just can't (or, more correctly choose not to) keep up with the tornado of a mess that my kids produce constantly. I try. I don't always succeed.

I also take short cuts. I sometimes kick something under the couch that I know no one will ever miss and doesn't really have a home, but if one of my boys sees it in the trash, will be reduced to tears. I never leave the dishes undone, but my coffee pot could use a good scrubbing. My basement playroom sometimes doesn't experience a cleaning presence for days at a time. I may have a dust bunny the size of Texas under my guest room bed.

I also have a pesky car in my kitchen. I swear, I have picked this same car up a dozen times and put it away, but still it seems to live in my kitchen! So lately, I am tired of said car and am actually sweeping around him! I kick him to the side, sweep where he was, then kick him back again and move along. Am I just to lazy to pick this guy up again? Why yes, yes I am!

No Dumping

We all have things that drive us crazy when it comes to our kids. One of mine is dumping.

I hate it when my kids enter that stage where they feel the need to simply dump things. A nice bin of Legos? Let's dump it in a pile! And here is a separate bin of dinosaurs! Let's dump it and add it to the mix! Oooh... puzzles! those would look better dumped out into a pile of pieces!

Play dates are especially stressful to me as it seems my baby boy is not the only one who enjoys this. I turn into the crazy, mean mom who keeps lecturing other boys on proper ways to play, trying to force them to clean up after themselves, or, at least actually play with what they have dumped out. Some kids really do only dump, but never actually play with the dumped toy. Like nails on a chalkboard...

My older two boys have tried it and learned their lesson. They no longer dump without permission. Sometimes, you need the bin of Tinker Toys dumped out to find that piece you are looking for. I get it. We do it. They also always play with the dumped toys afterwards.

Jack, however, is still learning. He still desires to dump his bin of dinosaurs out before he plays with his bin of cars. This was the age I struggled to teach my older two boys, so I have hope that Jack will quickly learn not to irritate mom in this way as well.

Am I not allowing my boys to experience the sheer joy of dumping? Perhaps. I just can't stand dumping for the sake of dumping.

What drives you crazy?

Just Imagine!

Mitchell comes up with some pretty interesting "what if" scenarios. Today, while finishing his lunch, he was contemplating a world in which his pesky mother didn't wipe or wash all the food off his face and hands after he so masterfully put it there.

After a sip of milk, (which completely covered his upper lip of course) he put some words to his thoughts: "Mom, what if we lived in a world where all wipes were sharp! And what if tissues were spiky?! And when you turned the faucet on, sharp spikes came out instead of water! Can you imagine that?"

I can imagine it, yes. I imagine your face would very quickly be unrecognizable from all the peanut butter and other food collected there.

Putting Them To Work

Why, oh why must movers insist on sticking an orange, yellow, or blue stamp-sized sticker to EVERY piece of furniture they move? I do realize there is a purpose, but surely the moving industry can come up with something better than that? Some way of organizing and keeping track of things that does not involve stickers that may or may not want to come off in the end?

For those of you who do not list "moving" as one of your regular activities, perhaps you have no idea what I am talking about. I'll tell you: every item that a mover moves gets a sticker with a number. Every box, every piece of furniture, every vacuum, broom, bike, scooter, stroller, rug... anything that they pick up and put in the truck. They don't take them off when unloading either.

Now since I have not always been the amazingly tidy and organized person I am today (haha), I actually have more than one sticker on some pieces of furniture - from other moves! How terrible is that!?

Well, no sticker is going to live long in this house! I have decided to no longer be the kind of person who has moving stickers stuck to everything or anything! I am putting the troops to work! I made heavy-duty sheets of paper with squares all over them (much like a sticker or chore chart) one for each boy. Soon, I will let them loose to fill up their papers! I have promised a penny for every sticker they find.

This sort of reminds me of the time my dad promised my sister and me a penny for every cigarette butt we picked up one time. We jumped on that, thinking we'd make a killing (we were young enough to actually think we'd make a killing) but after spending hours picking them up (nasty), we then had to re-count them! Imagine two little girls with bags of cigarette butts, counting them one by one...

Fortunately, we will be dealing with stickers here, not dirty, smelly garbage! I just hope the stickers come off easily, or I will have to run around even more than they do, trying to respond to all the "Help, mom! I can't get this one! This one is stuck! I ripped this one! Ben is trying to steal mine!"

Oh, To Be A Kid...

Who loves moving? Well, I guess on some level, I enjoy moving. I like seeing different parts of the world and new beginnings, but I am talking about the physical act of moving: the packing, the moving, the unpacking that drags on for weeks, the boxes, the mess, the piles of possessions you wish you had disposed of a long time ago and now have to find a spot for...

Who loves moving? I'll tell you who: my kids! They love new places and new houses and new adventures just like I do, but they love the other stuff as well! Packing up? Sweet! It gets them excited about the adventure beginning and they get a break from cleaning up their room! Boxes everywhere? Rad! We have dedicated one whole room in our new house of too many rooms just for box forts! Packing paper exploding out of every box? THE BEST!

I tell you, these movers must have used 5 or 6 pieces of packing paper for EVERY item in my kitchen. That is A LOT of paper to mess with, and mess with it we have done! I filled my new living room with a mountain of paper and the boys were leaping off couches and doing canon balls into the pile. They were completely burying themselves. They were having fights where they just threw it at each other until they collapsed in laughter.

Of course, they might not love the mess so much if they had any concept of the work involved cleaning up that much mess, but I'd rather they enjoy this as much as possible and not worry too much about how much work it is to move. That's my job.

I Can Do It Myself!

I am a huge fan of my boys doing things for themselves... in theory, that is. The big boys can easily dress themselves and get their own shoes on. They can even tie their own laces, but so often, it is just so much easier to help them with these things. They are so slow sometimes!

So now that Jack is at the point where he not just prefers, but insists on feeding himself, I find myself trying to stifle this progress. Would I love it if he neatly and quietly used his fork and spoon to lift small bites from his bowl to his mouth? Of course! What I don't love are his methods for getting the food to his mouth: holding a spoon in one hand, but using the other for squishing the oatmeal through his fingers, rubbing applesauce in his hair, opening up his sandwich and sticking it to his face, and stuffing as much food down into his lap as possible.

The problem with Jack is that he insists on being allowed to feed himself. He does not want to be fed every again. While I do try to stick to finger foods and other things he can more easily eat on his own, he does eat whatever we eat for dinner, and chili is just one of those things he can't manage very well! When he and I disagree over who will do the feeding, there is always a fight, and since I am the mom, I have to win and sometimes, we have to actually put dinner away and let him sit without anything for a while before we try again my way. He has even chosen to go without food at all rather than allow me to feed him.

His independence and determination are to be commended. I love that he wants to do things for himself. I just have to figure ways to slow it just a tad, as he is not quite as accomplished at... well, anything as he thinks he is!

Building a Small Village

Are you familiar with those little Christmas villages some people collect and decorate with?  Some have a piece or two, while others have dozens covering an entire table or mantle with the town they have collected, complete with ice-skating ponds, carolers, post office, grocery store, giant Christmas tree, etc...

Well, my kitchen counter tops are beginning to resemble one of these collections, and I am feeling a bit gigantic looking down on the town forming around me.  

A few days ago, Matt and I decided the boys would just love making their own gingerbread houses.  I got some supplies, got it all set out, then fully intended to stand back and let Matt and the boys create some masterpieces together.  One look at Matt's plan for Mitchell's house though, and I decided I had better step in and help Ben with his if I wanted it to have any resemblance to a real house (only slightly kidding here, Matt.  You and Mitchell were really on the same page with this!  Mountains of M&Ms on the roof, lava in the front yard, and a giant robot monster gingerbread man in the yard are really not traditional in this activity, but are so "Mitchell" that how can one argue?)  

It just looked like too much fun in the end to stand back and cringe every time frosting got plopped on the floor, walls crumbled to pieces all over every imaginable surface, M&Ms scattered and rolled under refrigerators and tables and cabinets.  If I have to clean this gluey, sticky mess up, I might as well get my hands dirty and get creative myself!

Well, that turned out to be just "phase 1" of the home-building project.  

Today, after Mitchell acted out being a "storm" and completely demolished his house and surrounding... decorations, we decided to tromp back to the store for further supplies.  The theme this time (chosen by the boys, not me) is ogre houses in the swamp.  My instructions as I walked the boys to school this morning were "Make sure you get ogre stuff, mom!  We need green frosting and worms and bugs and eyeballs and that kind of stuff!  Do you think you can find green frosting?"

So in addition to one normal house, one house post-tornado, and several oddly decorated gingerbread men on the side, we now add ogre huts to our "Christmas village" and I think round 3 will have to spread out into the dining room (or else we'll have to pretend to be giants and start eating.)

Some Thoughts On A Clean House

As I spend my entire free time this morning cleaning house, getting ready for friends to come over this evening, I am blogging in my head.  I sometimes drive myself a little crazy now that I think in blog, so I just had to take a tiny break to write it down so I can stop talking to myself.

I think I sometimes give the impression that I do not keep a clean house or that messes do not bother me.  I fear some picture me living in a house with toys never picked up and put away, floors never swept or mopped, toilets beginning to grow scary things in them, laundry in piles, mice roaming the place (similar to Templeton at the fair in Charlotte's Web.)

This simply is not the case.  I joke about the messiness of my house, but only to make light of the fact that truly, I am ALWAYS picking things up, putting them away, cleaning, straightening, sweeping... It really never ends, but I do stay on top of it (most of the time.)  In fact, the best compliment I have had to my cleaning attempts was a few days ago when, out of frustration that I was doing laundry yet again, Mitchell finally sighed and said, "Mom, no more laundry!  You are ALWAYS folding laundry!"  While that was not meant as a compliment, I'm sure, I took it as one and it felt nice that someone noticed that I am ALWAYS doing laundry!  He might be the first one in my family to realize that dirty clothes do not magically make the transformation from heap of dirtiness on the floor, to clean and folded in the drawer!  So thanks for the props there, Mitchell!

I really do try hard to keep my home a neat, tidy, and clean place.  This is difficult, given that I have one grown man and 3 not-yet-grown men constantly "learning" to help me with this task, but you can erase the image of Templeton at the fair grounds.  We are not living in filth!

It would help if my husband was more of a stickler for cleanliness.  Don't get me wrong, he is a very neat and clean individual, but his neatness/cleanliness is like a bubble around him.  He keeps himself and his things clean and picked up, but will step over a toy or pile of laundry or pile of dishes that are not his without seeming to notice they exist!  He just doesn't seem to mind a little messiness around the house.  

This is evident to me by the way he praises me for all the work I do around the house.  He has actually gotten quite good at recognizing that I work hard to keep the house clean and also thanking me for it, but the way he does it is quite funny to me.  I tell the truth, he seems to compliment or praise me for a house well kept more often on days I have not done anything more than a daily pick-up, and is completely immune to the days the floors are shiny clean, toilets sparkling, fresh scent of Pinesol permeating everything.  

I suppose I should be thankful that he isn't tougher on me, requiring a higher standard in this area.  Perhaps I do a better job than I think, or perhaps he just knows I have more to do than keep things perfectly clean.  I just think it might be more helpful in keeping things extra clean if he knew the difference between toys picked up and the house being "extra" clean.  Oh well.

Oh, Barf...

I don't have many words to express how much I love to be thrown up on, so I'll let my picture do most of the talking.  However, with the intention of grossing you out as much as possible, I'd like to remind you that Jack no longer just "spits up" a little milk, his barfing is the real deal, folks!  This was a full meal, about an hour into digestion that went straight into my hair and down my cleavage, then slid down to rest under my shirt wherever it could find a stopping place.  

You know I'm a blog addict when my baby barfs on me and, rather than immediately cleaning myself and baby up, I run for my camera.  Something is wrong with me...

Fort Couch Cushion

Creating forts out of my living room couch cushions is one of my boys' favorite indoor activities.  I can always count on that to buy me some extra time doing whatever it is I am doing.  Just when they are running out of steam and beginning to annoy each other and need a change of pace, all I have to do is say, "Hey guys, I have a great idea!  Let's make a mess of cushions!"  

"Mess of cushions" is the term we use for this game because it often doesn't even involve making anything really, other than a giant mess.  Now since our last move, we have WAY too many couches in our living room still, which is great news for Ben and Mitchell - plenty of walls, roofs, slides, and parts of caves, cars, boats, and volcanos to use!  

They pull them all off the couches and begin by just making a giant pile on the floor. Next, they wrestle around on this for a while (usually until someone gets wedged head down with feet in the air and can't get out or sandwiched under a large cushion and sat upon until they are tired of it.)  Once they have jumped around in this manner for a bit, the game gets a bit more organized, especially if Matt or I join in and help out.  Matt likes to get technical and build cars and boats with all sorts of details like convertible roofs and windshields and opening doors.  

My construction of choice is just the classic fort.  It is easy, it is sturdy, and all three boys can play in it without having to hold it together in some way, continually fix it, or shoe the littlest brother away again and again.

When we first moved to our newest place, I put a ban on this game because I no longer had a separate family room that could be messed up without messing the whole house up.  They could build forts in one room while I relaxed in another and still have a couch to sit upon.  Now that we are here, I have to sit amidst the wreckage as it happens and know that with each cushion that comes off, is one more cushion I have to help put back on.  

I have recently lifted the ban on "mess of cushions" though because they boys were constantly asking for it.  It really is a fairly easy mess to clean up, it keeps all three of them entertained and playing together, and even burns off a lot of that abundance of energy they always seem to possess.

Beware of Falling Objects

Jack has made an important discovery: gravity.  I'm sure he is not the first to discover this amazing phenomenon: seems like I've heard of it before, but he is pretty excited about it, nonetheless.  It seems there is no end to the fun of dropping things and watching them fall.  I load his high chair up with as many toys as I can and see how much I can get done in the kitchen before they all hit the floor: not much, I can tell you that.  

The bookcases in my living room are a great place to practice this idea of gravity as well.  He can reach the three bottom shelves and he regularly empties them of books, one by one, holding a book at eye level, then dropping it and watching it fall before grabbing the next.  This morning, he thoroughly explored my Stephen King collection.  He must really enjoy Mr. King because he took a break from dropping him to actually sit in a pile of his books and chew on them.  I think he enjoyed those books almost as much as Matt did, and was only about as hard on them as Matt already has been.  (I feel I should clarify here that Matt doesn't chew on books, just really "breaks them in.")

He loves to stand at the couch while I sit here and drop the same toy over and over again (provided I continue to pick it back up and hand it to him again and again.)  

As if I needed yet another mess-maker in my house of messy boys.  We are really working on teaching the big boys to clean up their own messes, but let's face it - I still do the bulk of picking up and cleaning up.  The book mess got old after about 3 seconds.  I'm not sure how to keep him away from bookcases and I certainly can't just leave the bottom three shelves of all 4 bookcases empty.  

I really can't enter a room now that has not been ransacked by Jack.  I know that soon, he will move from this dropping stage to the dumping stage though, which, in my mind at least, is even worse.  My older boys are not allowed to dump toy bins, but Jack has yet to learn that valuable lesson.  

So for now, I am on pick-up patrol.  Kids are messy, right?  Toys are meant to be played with.  Kids can learn to clean up.  Jack can be distracted from the books (sometimes.)  I do sometimes feel like I need to wear protective head gear around the stairs though when he is standing up there.  He has discovered that dropping toys makes WAY more noise if he systematically drops toy after toy through the railing, watching and listening to it crash and roll and clatter down each step.  Thank you, Jack, for giving me some more to do with  my days.  I was feeling a bit... bored and lazy.

What Could Be More Fun Than A Hose?

I have a bit of a love-hate relationship with weekends.  I love the idea of Matt being home for two days and spending time together as a family and sharing family responsibilities.  While   we do have fun together and Matt certainly pulls his weight 

with the kids when he is home, it never quite turns out how I 

envision it in my head.  Weekends often involve bacon smelling up my house, 4 boys leaving a wake of toys, clothes, food, and general destruction, over-tired boys yet no naps, weird schedules, and, worst of all, track and field on tv (yawn).  

This weekend was great, don't get me wrong.  I had a great time relaxing with my dudes, but this weekend was no escape from my usual annoyances.  By late afternoon, I was ready for bedtime, but no one else seemed to agree with me!  That was when, yet again, I remembered that wonderful hose on my upstairs patio!  I suggested a water-fight, turned the hose on for them, and it was magic-in-the-making for a tired mommy!  With one patio, one hose, one water gun, two buckets, and endless energy, they amused themselves for most of the rest of the evening.  It was a perfect activity for a hot afternoon.  I only wish I had thought of it sooner.  

When they began running out of new ideas for blasting each other with the hose and soaking everything in sight, Matt and I got out some cleaning tools to spruce up both patios and the fun began all over again!  I'm not sure what we spent on water today, but it is worth it.