What the First 28 Minutes of My Day Used To Be

In case it wasn't clear already, I've been going through my blog archives a bit lately!  Here's a post that is definitely a whole lot more hilarious to me now that it is 4 years later and I never wake up to children with poop accidents anymore!  From Jan. 27, 2010:

13 Snippets from my morning:

7:00 am - (It is a non-Shred work-out day because I plan to run later in the morning with the jogging stroller.) I wake-up to the sounds of feet pounding down the stairs. I hear my 2 year old telling my husband who is already in the kitchen, "There's dirt in my bed! Somebody need get dirt out!" I instantly know it is not "dirt" in the toddler's bed, but likely poop from an overflowing diaper. Pull covers up to my chin. Do I have to get up?

7:03 am - Realize no other mom is showing up today, so I must do the job. I get up, put on running clothes and begin working on packing 6 year old's lunchbox with all his favorite things, just like the day before.

7:10 am - Husband tells me, "He didn't eat any of his lunch yesterday. I unpacked it all last night and just some of the bread was eaten, nothing else."

7:13 am - I'm feeling the joy of packing a lunch that may return to me uneaten. Instead of writing, "Have a SUPER day. Love, Mom" on the napkin for the lunchbox, I write, "EAT YOUR LUNCH! Love, Mom"

7:14 am - Pour myself some cereal and coffee and head into dining room where my 3 children and husband are already happily eating breakfast.

7:15 am - Am OVERWHELMED by the smell of poop! And amazed that everyone is eating and nobody seems at all bothered by the smell! "Does Toddler have a dirty diaper?" I ask (Toddler still wears a diaper for sleeping). "Don't you smell that?!!"

7:16 am - Husband does not, in fact, smell that, but does manage to lean over to check the diaper status of the toddler sitting next to him. "He's not wearing a diaper!"

7:17 am - The realization hits. Toddler got his bath early last night and was put in jammies without a diaper since he'd still be awake for a while. Then when we put him to bed we didn't think to put the diaper on since he usually gets the diaper with the jammies. Suddenly the "dirt" in his bed makes perfect sense to me. My husband still doesn't get it. "Yeah, I didn't know what he meant about the 'dirt'"

7:18 am - Because I have already poured the milk on my cereal and not had even one swallow of coffee, I opt to try to finish a few bites of breakfast before dealing with the situation.

7:19 am - Toddler is done eating, gets out of his chair, and comes over to me. Toddler wants to sit on my lap! Smell is overwhelming! Breakfast is over!

7:21 am - Toddler gets hosed off in the bathtub.

7:25 am - I head into Toddler's room in total fear of what I'll find.

7:28 am - Thankfully not too bad, as poop hunts go anyway (yes, having 3 children it is not my 1st experience with such things). Fairly easily cleaned up, all the while explaining to my 4 year old daughter why there was poop on the floor. Sheets and jammies in the washer on hot with the color-safe bleach. Bathtub needs a bleach treatment, too!

What can I say? It's a glamorous job!

Update on The Library: My friend and foe

I had my 4 kids in the library this week and there was a mom there with her 3 little kids.  Her toddler was running around like crazy and every time the mom tried to stop the toddler, she'd scream.  Finally the mom said to her older 2 kids, "We have to go.  We'll come back another day without the baby!"

I smiled at her because oh how I remember those days!  Only now that my kids are 11, 8, 7, and 5 years old can we go to the library and everyone mostly behaves!  Even Little Girl can find a book on her level and quietly sit looking at it, instead of doing cartwheels, running around, or wildly pulling books off the shelves like she did last summer.  But we had years of scenes in the library before getting to this day of near library-bliss.  It occurred to me that I even wrote a post long ago about my troubles taking my kids to the library.  

Here it is "The Library:  My friend and foe" from June 8, 2009:

I love the concept of the library. You know, millions of books all free for the reading. Adventure and knowledge just waiting to be unlocked!

I love books. I don't get to read my books as much as I'd like, but I do daily get to read The Book (the Bible) and children's books, and I am thankful for that.

It brings me great joy to see my children loving books. My daughter, in particular, loves books and can recite many of her favorites, word for word!

But the thing is, in actuality, the library and my children don't really mix well.

I have yet to have what I would consider a really good library experience with my children. Maybe the library + one of my children would be fine, lovely, enjoyable even? But I am usually in the situation of the library + 3 of my children and that = chaos!

Imagine toddler wildly pulling books off the shelf, standing and bouncing on the various stools, attempting to scale the fish tank! Older kids running and yelling in a place where that sort of behavior is very frowned upon. Not to mention I am usually trying to find a particular book I've wanted to share with the kids and that distracts me from their behavior long enough for things to go very bad very fast!

This past week's library visit our downfall was the discovery of the movies you can check out from the library for free. I mistakenly pointed the kids to the roundabout rack with kid movies and said, "Let's find one that would be good to check out!" Suddenly, the rack was spinning around so fast, kids were grabbing movies, and movies were flying. I'd pick a few up and return them to their proper place only to have more movies fly off! It was quite the scene before I was able to get things (kids) under control and get us over to the check out desk.

But the check out desk has its own commotion. And do you know why? Because about a year ago I thought it would be such a neat idea for the kids to have their own library cards. I loved the image of them carrying their own book choices up to the counter and handing the librarian their card to check them out and, of course, thanking her after she scanned their card and books. But in reality it is not so idyllic and I just know those librarians breathe a sigh of relief when we finally leave!

The library should also really have stricter limits on how many books they allow us to check out because I apparently cannot enforce a reasonable limit. "Sure!" I say as my kids pick out more and more to check out. But when it comes time to return over 20 library books, it is not so fun trying to find them all within our house!

Give me a swim meet or running a marathon, but the library? It wears me out.

But still I solider on. In fact, we are going back tomorrow. Why? Because I am determined to have a good library experience with my children.

A Surprising Blog Post That Has Seen A Lot of Traffic

I rarely look at the stats for my blog, because I just don't have the time, but when I do, I'm typically surprised by the posts that have seen the most traffic.

For example, do you know one of my top ten most viewed blog posts is "Trapped in a McDonald's Playland!" from July 27, 2009?  According to Blogger, it has been viewed 1,753 and counting!

Maybe there is an unknown epidemic of children getting trapped in McDonald's playlands and parents are often Googling the search term "trapped in mcdonald's playland" because if you do that, my blog is the 4th result that comes up!

It's too bad that I had no idea at the time I wrote that blog post that it would be read so much because really my post offers no real useful advice on getting one's trapped child out of the McDonald's playland, unless you count "send an older sibling up after them" as helpful!

Here's the original post in all it's glory (from July 27, 2009):

We nearly never go to McDonald's, but we traveled to visit family this past weekend, and stopped to eat at what my kids call "Old McDonald's" on the car trip there. I most certainly did NOT laugh so hard at the following incident!

It was NOT my 2 year old who climbed to the top of the playland and began loudly calling, "Mommy, come here! Come here Mommy!" 

Did you see his little face and hands in the center of that last picture? Here's the zoomed out pic. so you can see how stuck he is right in the middle of this biggest-McDonald's-playland-I've-ever-seen! Seriously, there was no easy way up there and no easy way out!

Thankfully he has older siblings because I was wearing a dress and I'm a bit claustrophobic. I've done the whole rescuing-a-kid-from-a-playland thing before with my older two and I get a little trapped and panicked feeling up there! My husband played the "I'm 6 feet tall; I can't get in there" card. So we sent our 6 year old up there to rescue his brother. His first attempt was unsuccessful. Next we sent our nearly 4 year old daughter up. Success!! She was able to gently talk him up to the top of a slide and then he rode down on big brother's lap!

Why is it that my kids as 2 year olds seem to have no trouble scurrying to the top of those things, in fact they do it so fast before we can stop them, but then need help getting down?!!

The Toddler Years

I was around a friend's toddler son recently and he was so cute and reminded me so much of my boys when they were smaller.

I almost said out loud that I missed those toddler years, and in many ways I do miss it, but I have photographic evidence of what it's REALLY like living with a toddler:

And also evidence of the joys of that THIRD child! 

For anyone still in the throws of parenting a toddler, it does pass.

That adorable, mischievous little guy of mine is now 7 years old!  (And he never colors on the wall any more!) 

And the Mr. Clean Eraser?  Is your friend!!

What it's really like baking with kids . . .

Recently I stumbled across these pictures from 4 years ago:

And I wonder why there is always so much chaos.  I was baking with my 5, 3, and 1 year olds!

Those babies are 9,7, and 5 now.  That squishy little guy eating the spilled sugar started kindergarten a few weeks ago!

The chaos?  Often drives me crazy.  

It did then, it still does now.  

But as much as I long for less mess and less noise, I'd never trade those things for less LIFE!


Find more Thankful Thursday here.

Flashback 3!

Okay, so I promise to take a break from the flashbacks soon, but oh, the memories!!

Today, we're flashing back to October 19, 2003. 

We only had 1 child back then, our son was 8 months old.  We were on vacation in Siesta Key, Florida and in this picture we'd gotten up early to watch the sun rise.  I remember this moment and just how perfect it was!  Cuddling with my baby boy as the sun came up over the water.  

I loved those dinosaur jammies!  And he was so easy to travel with back then, which was just a couple months before he started walking and everything got harder.  Also, that vacation to Siesta Key was one of my favorites, it is a beautiful Florida destination!

Flashback 2!

Today I'm flashing back to August 28, 2006.

So, not too far off from yesterday's time period, we had 2 kids, my son who was 3 years old and my daughter who had just turned 1 year old.

I had to document this, because I say all the time that she "climbed before she walked" and it's true!  My boys walked pretty early but my little girl didn't walk until 13 or 14 months old, but she had mastered climbing by then.  She'd crawl over to things and then climb up!  Here I'd left the fridge open for a second and caught her climbing in!

She looks pretty proud of herself!

Tell me you had/have the Leapster Fridge Letter thing.  Now it's been years since we've had that thing on our fridge but I can still sing you the song, "The 'A' says 'ah', the 'A' says 'ah', every letter makes a sound, the 'A' says 'ah'."  Really I attribute the school success of my older two to that device alone!  Kidding.  Sort of!

Flashback!

As I've been tackling pictures lately, I thought it would be fun to have some flashback blog posts to feature some photos and bits of life before It Feels Like Chaos.  Not that it didn't feel like chaos back then, too, because I'm sure it did, but I just wasn't blogging then, so the chaos is not documented.

These flashbacks will be totally random and could pop up on this blog at any point ('course the most likely outcome is that I'll be all excited at the beginning and inundate you with them before totally forgetting about the whole thing!).

Today I'm featuring November 11, 2006!

We had 2 kids back then.  My son was 3 years old and my daughter 15 months old.

I love these pictures of them cuddled up together in a chair.

Really, couldn't you just EAT them up?!!

When I look back on these pictures now nearly 6 years later, my heart hurts a little because they've grown up so much and so fast!  I miss cuddling and hugging those babies but I'm so proud of the little people those babies have turned into!   And they are pretty cool to hang out with and still sweet to hug!  Not to mention potty trained, that's a plus!