It's funny in hindsight.

What I want to do today:  Empty everything out of my storage room, clean the room, organize the remaining boxes (I started this project months ago) and load it all back in, leaving me with an attractive and fully functional room.

What I'm going to do today:  Damage control.

Seriously.  I wake up and discover that the laundry in the washer was rinsed but never washed, and is giving off an, um, unattractive musty aroma.  Then I hear a crash from the livingroom.  It's Samuel, who has managed to pull down the floor lamp, breaking the lightbulb, and is lying in a cluster of broken glass.  No injuries, but all little people confined to quarters until Mama has cleaned up.  I get the last of the glass dealt with and my mom calls with bad news, but not quite as bad as when I hang up the phone to discover the dirty diaper to end all dirty diapers on Sam, which he has managed to hide from me for at least an hour judging by how hard it was to wash off.  Oh man.  I get that done in time to discover that the air conditioner has started leaking water from the inside of the machinery.  Like, water is not just coming out of the drain plugs, it's coming out of the sealed body of the machine.  This is not good.  This is very bad.  I spend the next twenty minutes attempting to mop up the mess and drain the machine so that it won't short out on me.  Probably just as well I don't put away that mopping cloth, because Samuel takes the diaper free opportunity to pee all over the hall carpet.

It's now 10am.

After the carpet is cleaned up and the boy is re-diapered, and is happily trying to empty all the toys out of every basket in his room, I try and multitask.  Can I run the washer through another rinse AND microwave a cup of tea?  Yes, yes I can.  I don't have time to get my tea before the next problem, which comes in the form of a giant frozen turkey that has been defrosting for 24 hours and is still the consistency of a brick.  So...um, what am I serving for supper NOW?  I reach for my roasting pan to discover a LIVE GRUB IN IT OH MY GOSH KILL IT NOW!  I scrub the pan three times with soap before putting the turkey in a cold water bath and popping it back in the fridge.  Which is when I see the blood on the counter.  Apparently the turkey wasn't as frozen as I thought it was.  While I'm in the fridge I see that David forgot his lunch.  Samuel, having tired of controlled destruction in the bedroom, is now 'helping' in the kitchen, and that's not improving either of our moods.  I get the washer started again and put milk in my re-heated tea.  Just in case I don't get this turkey defrosted, I pull sausages out of the freezer while I think about whether it would be better to wake the baby or not.  Samuel comes back into the kitchen asking to watch Bob the Builder.  Fantastic; I'll put on the DVD, get him set up on the sofa, drink my tea and then get both children dressed.

As I head into the livingroom with Samuel's clothes I hear a funny noise that turns out to be a cat locked in the storage room for the past hour.  Once he's gratefully let out he lets me know just how starving he really is, and since I can't bring myself to wake up Clara yet and add another person to the mix, I lay out her clothes and diaper and go to feed them.  I call David to let him know we'll bring his lunch over to him, but he's working outside and I can't get him, so I figure I'll start working on the air conditioner problem.  The instruction manual says that the machine should be on flat ground to 'avoid leaking'; I know the machine was at a slight angle, so I'm debating whether I should assume it was that, drain the machine and try it again, or if that's risking an electrical shock.  While I debate this with myself, the phone rings.  More bad news.  This time I may have a solution to it, and while I go to work Samuel needs to nurse to keep him quiet during the conversation.

It's now after 11.  I still haven't eaten breakfast but that's a moot point now that we're so close to lunch.  I had plans to meet a friend to run a few errands right about now, and I'm feeling pretty on top of things as I get a changed, dressed, fed little boy strapped into his stroller in the hallway and dash upstairs to get Clara ready and popped into the carrier.  Immediately I realize my mistake in leaving her until the last minute.  She's wet through her diaper cover and soaked my sheets and as I start to change her I realize she's got a very dirty diaper as well.  Samuel is muttering impatiently in the hallway, still strapped into the stroller as I frantically change and dress her, answering a phone call that comes at the same time and tossing David's lunch in the back of the stroller.  I'm late, but I sit down on the inside steps anyway to nurse her and as I sit her up to burp she spits up on my pants.  Then throws up all down the front of my shirt.  Twice.  I don't have time to change now so I just put her in the carrier, grab my wallet and head out to meet my friend.  We drop off David's lunch and then go to our errand together.

Except, I can't find the address.  I thought I knew it, I'd even double checked it before I left the house, but despite walking around for half an hour in the hot sun, we have to admit defeat.  On the way home Samuel starts to fall asleep in the stroller and as I take him out at home I discover he's wet through his pants and the stroller itself is wet.  Well, I put him down for a nap anyway because although this will mean a full outfit and sheet change in a few hours or so, if I try and change his diaper now he'll wake up completely and I may not get him to nap at all.

He goes to bed, which is Clara's cue to start crying.  She slept in for so many hours that she isn't tired at all and wants to play.  So I make my lunch with one hand, put the kettle on and settle in for our daily marathon nursing session.  It's 1 o'clock by this point.  We have dinner plans in four hours and I am going to need 15 minutes in there somewhere to shower, so I'm hoping that Clara will allow herself to be lulled to sleep.  Of course, today is not the day for that sort of thing and we spend the next hour and a half rocking, nursing and snuggling.  By 3 o'clock Clara has drifted off and is lying in her cradle.  Which gives me less than 5 minutes to wash a diaper cover and hang it to dry, and wash one pot in the sink, before I hear "Moooooo-oommm?" from Samuel's room.  He is very wet, just like I knew he would be.  He gets a snack, and then Clara wakes up, and then I nurse her, and then Sam is back....

But I realize I can't shower anyway because the air conditioner is in the bath tub.

I call David to tell him to bring home milk, drain the turkey (which is still not defrosted....arrrggghhh!)There is no real possibility at this late in the game that I'll be able to shower before we go out.  It's taken me seven hours so far, and I've run a load of laundry through the washer and washed one pot.  So much for getting lots done.  Samuel calls for help at the same time a phone call comes.  And then all of a sudden David is home, and we're trying to decide if we should pick up steak or strawberries for the dinner party, except that it doesn't end of mattering because by the time we get out everything is closed.

But, despite all of this, we have supper, and Samuel eats.  Clara calms down.  Everyone falls asleep by 8:30 and I get the laundry finished.  What a day.

Saturdays Around My House #3

What I did on Saturday

an essay by Amy E.

We woke up and went to the graduation service of a friend of ours who has successfully completed his BA in Religion and is in the midst of the pastoral search that David and I will be doing by this time next year.  A sobering thought.  The service was long, but we ran into an old friend on the way out and agreed to have lunch later in the week and catch up on how school is going for him and what his plans are for the Summer.  Then we went down to Canadian Tire to look at Tupperware storage bins, which I am amasing a collection of as I try and get the storage room into order.  Said storage bins were on 'sale' at $10 apiece, which is ridiculous, and so we went to the grocery store and bought some bread and cheese.  Samuel let me know in no uncertain terms that he needed food STAT by eating through the plastic wrap on the cheese before I could stop him and swallowing a giant piece, plastic and all.  Bad mother.  Quite a bit of cheese and a piece of bread later he was ready to keep going and we headed over to the thrift store because I'm always on the look out for half a dozen items - usually quilts and bags of yarn, but the Superstore in the area also donates all of their sale items to the thrift store and you get brand new clothes for very very little.  I buy a lot of Samuel's clothing that way.  And someone in town owns a lot of OshKosh boy's stuff because Samuel has several pairs of overalls and shirts at about a dollar each.  And OshKosh never seems to wear out.  Then we started home, stopping once to nurse and once for Mama to get a hamburger and buy Daddy lunch, and then stopping in at the soap store to price their castille soap and again at the natural health food store to buy a little bag of whole wheat flour and something else I'll blog about later.  My flour, a lovely big bag of it that I bought a few months ago had WEAVILS in it, which just bothered me to no end.  I threw it all out, but really...weavils?  Didn't they sort of die out with petticoats and irons you heated on the stove?  I think Little House on the Prairie mentions weavils.  And we kept staggering onward and gave Daddy his cold hamburger lunch and then made it home, four and a half hours after we had left.  Samuel went down for a nap and I helped a friend write his sermon for tomorrow and had a cup of tea.  Then Samuel was up again and we went to get Daddy from work and take a walk town to the next village, as their United Church was having an all-you-can-eat roast beef dinner.  My gentlemen told me it was my Mother's Day meal out, which I was very happy with, and was even happier with my card and a very pretty necklace they had picked out together.  We all ate too much, even Samuel, and then walked home, stopping in at the garden centre to look at their herbs.  I had a bath with the lovely new bath salts my mother sent me, and then put the boy down to sleep and sat with David while we watched a Frank Peretti short film: "Answers For Atheists".  And now I am off to bed.  What a nice, and exhausting, day before mother's day. 

Saturdays Around The House #1

I'm going to try something a bit different in this space and attempt to host a weekly series.  I'm saying attempt because I'm embarassed to mention how much time I've spent trying to A) find an image to use. 
B) Discover I have to design my own.  C) Fiddle for days (gosh I only wish I was making this up) with said image.  D) Discover that Blogger hates my image in any of it's forms.  E) Register with Mister Linky. F) Figure out how to change HTML code on my posts (after I figure out what HTML is)...it goes on.  And on.  Anyway, hope you enjoy it!
Here's how it works.  First write your post telling us about all of your Saturday.  Somewhere in that post, or at the end, link to my blog.  Then just come on over here and put your name and blog address into the Mister Linky widget on the bottom of the page and it will appear on my blog for everyone to click on and read.  It'll be fun!  Yay, I can't wait to meet you.

Oh, and my Saturday?

Today we ran out of salt, sugar, tea, milk, bread, jam, diapers and baby wipes.  The baby got a cold and threw up lunch.  I waited for 30 minutes to take a chicken pot pie out of the oven for supper, only to discover I had turned the oven on and never put the pie in.  I was halfway through a much anticipated sermon on my cd player when the batteries died and it started from the beginning again. 

I'll spare you the details.  Suffice to say that in the absence of chocolate in my house, I'm eating spoon after spoon of honey with walnuts on top.