Author name: Sandra Tayler

This evening Patches was very seriously explaining to my why I should give him some M&Ms to eat along with his cottage cheese. It was a very long and involved explanation. When he got to the point where he informed me that M&Ms equal cottage cheese I couldn’t help it and I burst into laughter. His little face crumpled into the most adorable humiliated tears. I was immediately contrite and snuggled him into my lap to calm him down. I have to remember that these things are very serious and important to him no matter how funny they seem to me.

We don’t have either broadcast, cable, or satellite television in our house. This does not mean that we live in an entertainmentless cave. Instead we’ve gotten creative about how we get our hands on the entertainment we’re interested in watching. It is more work, but it means that we don’t have to put up with all the advertising and dreck programming that comes with a regular supply of television. We rent DVDs, buy movies, borrow movies, or barter trades. For a while we had a very happy arrangement where we traded homemade bread for the loan of MST3K videos. When my oldest kids were younger a friend kindly recorded a bunch of PBS programming for us. They watched and rewatched these tapes for years. Then the tapes sat and gathered dust because the older kids had outgrown them.

Today Gleek fell sick. Again. She needed something quiet to watch. I dug around the video cabinet and unearthed a tape labeled Zoboomafoo. I’d nearly forgotten this show. It isn’t on the air anymore, but my kids loved it at the time. I played the tape for Gleek. The image and sound have degraded a little with age, but Gleek didn’t mind. She was as enraptured as my older kids were when they were her age. Not only that, but as the older two came home from school, they plunked down to watch as well. Kiki reminisced loudly about how she always used to watch the show back in the “olden days.” I don’t know what it is about Chris & Martin Kratt and their lemur friend, but we’re all happy that they’ve come to visit again.

My friend’s baby was born around 5 pm, which meant that I was able to hand her four kids over to her husband by about 7:30. They went to go see their baby sister and then he’ll put them all to bed. My house is so much quieter with only four kids in it. I’ll probably have some or all of these other kids in my house tomorrow and Friday until their mom comes home from the hospital, but for tonight I have hustled my own crew off to bed and I have blessed silence.

Have I mentioned that I do not aspire to have eight kids?

My home has been invaded by four extra children. They’re here because their parents had to go to the hospital to give birth. This means I may have these extra kids all night long. I’m already mentally figuring out sleeping arrangements and how I’ll manage school departures in the morning if they’re still here. It is exciting to be able to help with this kind of an event. I’m really enjoying being the one who watches all the kids rather than the one who is in labor.

The five minute clean up is my new best friend. One day I hauled each kid individually into their bedrooms with the requirement that we both clean as hard as we could for 5 minutes. At the end of 5 minutes the kid was done whether or not the room was clean. Two kids per room means that each room got 10 minutes worth of cleaning. Lo and behold 10 minutes was all it took to make the floors vacuumable again. I spent 20 minutes and each of the kids spent five.

On both of the nights since that project I have enforced a five minute clean up in our toy strewn family room. This time all the available children were drafted for the same five minutes. I really had to crack the whip to keep them moving, but at the end of five minutes the room was clean and I didn’t have to be mean any more.

I’ve also been applying this to myself. I’ll take 5 minutes and pick up my bedroom or my office or the front room. Doing a 5 minute pick up breaks down the huge “clean the house” task into bite size chunks. Everyone knows that bite size chunks are much easier to eat a lot of.

My house has been much nicer and cleaner these past three days. Yay for good advice via LJ!

This morning I decided to treat myself to sausage mcgriddles on the way home from dropping kids at school. Patches was in the car with me, so I planned to get him one too. I also decided to bring one home for Howard. We pulled up to the drive through window to Patches delight. He loves to buy food to take home. Instantly from the back seat there was a littany of “They sell hambuwgews? I want a hambuwgew!” I shushed him and placed an order for 4 sausage mcgriddles. Patches was paying attention because he switched to asking for mcgriddles.
“I want a mcgwiddle!”
I was relieved that we weren’t going to have an upset over the lack of hamburgers at 10 am. “That’s good, because I have one for you.”
In a matter of fact voice Patches announced. “You have fouw.”
I was suprised that he’d paid such close attention. “That’s right. I have four. One for you, and one for me, and one for Daddy.”
I couldn’t see Patches face because I was driving, but his tone of voice made very clear that he was not at all fooled my attempted misdirection. “That’s fwee.” He informed me.
I suddenly felt a need to explain further. “The extra one is for me because I am super hungry.” There was a brief silence then Patches announced:
“I’m super hungwy.”
I think I answered with something along the lines of him needing to finish his first one and then we would see about others. He thought for a moment then asked
“Can mine be extwa?”
“Sure, yours can be extra.”
“Then we will have two extwas. One for you and one for me.”

So we took home our mcgriddles and ate up all the extras.

Once again it is 3:30 Monday afternoon. I’m tired. I’m frazzled. I feel like the day is gone and I’ve accomplished nothing. This feeling is common on Monday afternoons. I spend from 7 am until 9 am getting kids fed, dressed, and out the door for school. Patches has gymnastics at 9:15 and I usually use that hour for errands. Then I bring him home for an hour. Then we go fetch Gleek from school. Then 30 minutes later I take Gleek to gymnastics. Then I drive straight to Link’s school to pick him up. Then home for 30 minutes. Then I pick up Gleek. Then home for 15 minutes. After picking up Kiki it takes me about 30 minutes to feel settled here at home and mentally ready to do something. Voila! It is now 3:30.

If my only goal for the day was to meet the needs of the kids, this list of things done would be just fine. But Monday comes after Sunday. On Sunday I honor the sabbath and do not work. I don’t usually get businessy things done on Saturday either. This means I have a two day backlog on shipping out books. I feel like I should be getting that done first thing, but I don’t. There is also the inevitable backlog of housework and laundry which occurs after our day of rest. I get up in the morning on Monday and already feel like I’ve fallen behind.

Recognizing this pattern has caused me to make some shifts in our family schedule starting in January. I’ve moved Patches gym lesson to another day. Gleek and Link are both dropping out of gym so that they can take an art class together at their school. I have to volunteer for this class, but it sandwiches nicely between Link’s pick up and Kiki’s pick up. At least this way when I have home time I can just be at home rather than having to run out constantly to drop off or pick up.

I hope it will be enough better that I can finish out the remaining 5 months of school. I look ahead blissfully to the time next fall when Kiki will ride the bus to junior high. Link and Gleek will be dropped off/picked up at the same time. Instead of making 5 trips daily our family will be down to 2 trips, or less if the kids walk home.

I’m pretty sure I’ve mentioned/complained about all of this before. But somehow reminding myself that it won’t last forever helps me to deal with it now.

During the month of November I had a goal to write a blog entry every day. I met that goal. In doing so I seem to have created something of a habit. I’m not complaining. I like having a daily reason to focus my writing capabilities on some topic or another. However to help me out on those days when I would stare at the blank screen at a loss for what to write, I created a list of possible blog topics. I called it my Blogable list. The list was written on post-it notes and stuck to the cupboard door of my computer hutch. I still have the list and I keep adding to it. Somehow the list keeps getting longer rather than shorter.

Several months ago I went back and reread all of my teenage journals. There were many of them filled with endless chatter about peers and my feelings about relationships and my ponderings on my self worth and who I wanted to become and religious musings. 95% of my journals covered these topics. I hardly ever mentioned things I did with my family. I never mentioned schoolwork or my teachers even though they were huge in my life at the time. I never mentioned the things I was learning. As I read back I saw these huge gaps and wished that my teenage self had had a Blogable list so that she could have been reminded of the other things that there were to write about.

I remember those frustrating gaps in my teenage journals and I wonder what gaps am I leaving in this online journal today. I can’t see the gaps from where I’m standing, just as my teenage self didn’t see her gaps. So I am enlisting all of your eyes. Are there things I have mentioned in passing that you’d like to hear more about? Are there things that I completely fail to mention because they seem obvious to me, but aren’t to you? Are there questions you’ve been wanting to ask and have answered? If there are, leave them in the comments below. I’ll add these things to my Blogable list. I give no guarantees that I’ll actually respond to all of the comments. This is a public journal and there are some things that I’m leaving out very deliberately. However it is possible that you’ll provide me with impetus and material to write some entries that will entertain us all.

In each day I only have so much energy to make kids do stuff. On school days I focus on making them get ready for school and making them to homework. On Sunday I concentrate on making them get ready for church and making them behave themselves during church. Since teaching my kids to clean house is part of my parental duties, only Saturday is left for making the house clean. So on Saturday’s I make kids clean house. The problem with this schedule is that I rarely get a break from making them do stuff and they rarely get a break from having to do stuff.

I can’t just let the housework go. That results in a cluttered house and crankiness from everyone. But maybe if I expend just a little bit more energy on weekdays, there won’t be as much housework to do on Saturdays. Maybe I’ll take one Saturday a month and let us all goof off all day. As it stands I’ve been letting us all take a break from school by making us all clean house. When I put it that way, it doesn’t sound like a break at all.

More thought is necessary here.

I’d been occupied in my office for quite a while when I became aware of all the quietness upstairs. The house is pretty quiet when the older three are at school, but usually I can hear Patches clunking or thumping or playing some kind of a game. I went to find out what the total silence meant. I found Patches very carefully cutting up an old flyer sent home from the school. Cutting is an activity I generally try to supervise because kids often get …creative… when left alone with a pair of scissors. In this case no damage was done, so I calmly stepped forward to Patches to ask what he was doing.

“I’m cutting words.” He informed me. I saw that he had indeed carefully cut a strip of words from the page. I then noticed that he was further rendering the strip of words into individual letters. This flier was in a 12 point font and Patches was carefully rendering the entire half page into individual letters. He had already accumulated quite a little pile.
“Are those your words?” I asked pointing to the pile.
“Yeah. It’s a pile for the alphabet song.”

This kid amazes me. He’s three and a half. Where did he get that much patience and persistence?