by Rachel Toalson | Messy Mondays
This picture is called “This is What Happens Five Minutes After the Kids Get Home from the Grandparents.”
I don’t even know how this happened. I just remember going out to the car to get the baby and their suitcases, and I walked back in to a paper explosion all over the living room and boys chattering about all the stories they wrote and pictures they drew at Nonny’s house.
Husband and I sent the boys away for a week-long stay at my mom’s house (thanks, Mom! Sort of! I mean, thanks for keeping the boys! No thanks for sending home all the “artwork” they created while they were gone!). While the house sat silent, with only the infant to keep us company, Husband and I organized the house, donated half their toys, cleaned out our old clothes we’ll probably never wear again, reduced our books by about 200 (there are still about 800) and tidied the entire house. So you have to understand, the house was spotless before boys walked in.
“Wow!” they said, because they have never seen it so tidy. “How did you get the house so clean?”
Five minutes later, they had their answer.
WE SENT YOU AWAY.
Connections like that are lost on kids, though. They could not see the tidy house and, five minutes later, the papers-taking-over house and think, “Hmm. This must have happened because I decided to show Mama and Daddy my five thousands pieces of artwork.”
Oh my word.
I just got done reading The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up. I sort of thought it might be possible to keep our house tidy if we just had a place for everything and we reduced enough of our possessions so they wouldn’t make a mess every ten seconds.
BUT KIDS.
They’ll always find a way to make a mess of things, I think. I’m done trying. So, welcome, papers. Thank you for coming. Please stay a while. Crawl between our couch cushions and get shoved under the armchair farther away than my arm can reach when I finally have the energy to tidy up again and make sure you come visit our bed right before we fall asleep. That’s my fave.
P.S. Nonny, we are now working on Project For Nonny wherein they draw five pictures every day until the next time you take them for a weekend (don’t make it too long or…). I’ll make sure to pack them up in a suitcase all nice and neat and pretty. So of course they’ll stay tidy.
by Rachel Toalson | Messy Mondays
It doesn’t matter if they put their shoes in the designated basket beside the front door as soon as they walk in. It doesn’t matter if just three seconds ago there was a left shoe and a right shoe. It doesn’t matter if they were wearing their shoes thirty seconds ago.
When we are ready to leave the house, we will always be searching for shoes. Always. I know it’s an absolute, and I’ve said it twice even, but this is what eight years of parenting have taught me: You will always be looking for shoes. And they hide well. They hide impossibly well.
We don’t have high standards. We just want them to wear shoes. We don’t care if one shoe is green and another is black. We don’t care if one is a flip flop and the other is a tennis shoe. We don’t care.
But the thing about mismatched shoes is there has to be a left one and there has to be a right one.
We tried to leave the house today, because we don’t have any food in our refrigerator and I thought a trip to the store would probably be a good idea (even though it’s not, because kids). I tried my best for thirty whole minutes. I only have three kids here right now, because grandparents are watching the other three. It should have been (comparatively) easy.
Except this is all I could find. Mismatched shoes, and they were all the same foot. I can’t work with this.
And since I’m looking for every excuse not to haul 3-year-old twins and a five-month-old to the grocery store, we just stayed home.
Oh, well. Who needs food?
by Rachel Toalson | Messy Mondays
This right here is the story of my life. Clothes. And hampers. And clothes that don’t make it in hampers.
We have laundry hampers stationed strategically around our house. There is one downstairs because boys strip as soon as they get in the door. There is one in the hallway between their rooms because their bathroom is too small to hold one. There is one in their daddy’s and my bathroom because three boys use our tub to save on bath time.
And yet there are still clothes on the floor.
This picture was taken after my 8-year-old’s bath last night. That white thing? That’s the hamper. The green shirt is touching the hamper. IT’S TOUCHING THE HAMPER. How much more effort would it have taken to get the shirt IN the hamper?
Apparently too much.
I don’t get it. I really don’t. Well, at least not until I walk back into our bedroom and trip over a pair of my husband’s jeans he left on the floor instead of tossing in the hamper.
Methinks I’m fighting a losing battle.
by Rachel Toalson | Messy Mondays
“One day, baby,” he says.
“One day, what?” I say, because usually this ends in something like “One day we’ll go to Paris” or “One day we’ll take a weekend to New York” or “One day we’ll have a clean house,” but it’s too early in the morning for dreaming big like that.
“One day we’ll be able to walk around our house and not get glitter on us,” he says.
Two of our boys got into glitter the other day. We left them downstairs for their Quiet Time with explicit instructions about what was expected and what they were allowed to play with. Glitter was most definitely not on the list.
An hour later, when we came back downstairs to check on them, green glitter was everywhere, in little neat piles. But everyone who knows glitter knows it won’t stay that way.
Now it’s everywhere.
(See the baby in the picture? If you look really closely, you’ll see some specks of glitter on his belly. This is not because we let him play with glitter, of course. It’s just that glitter.)
That night, we had glitter in our chicken soup, glitter in our water, glitter in our spice cookies for dessert.
There is glitter on my laptop. There is glitter on all our books. There is glitter on the seat of my pants and on every surface of my kids’ skin.
It’s been days, y’all. It doesn’t matter how many times we’ve wiped it up and thrown it in the trash. Glitter is persistent. It just keeps coming back.
“Hey, Mama, come look at my poop!” my 6-year-old said today. (This is not an unusual request in a household of boys. So, of course I did.)
There was glitter in his poop. Amazing.
I don’t know if we’re ever going to see the end of it.
by Rachel Toalson | Messy Mondays
There are many great mysteries in the life of a parent.
One of the biggest, for me, are these stuffed animals. They’re all over our house, because my boys love stuffed animals and their grandparents know it.
Stuffed animals aren’t all that unusual in the world of a child. What is unusual is that these stuffed animals are DRESSED.
They are dressed when my children are not.
“I have to take you to the store with me,” I say. “Please go get dressed.”
Fifteen minutes later, I trip over Sully, who is dressed. Sitting beside him is my 6-year-old, who is not.
This is a great mystery to me, that my boys liked dressing their stuffed animals better than dressing themselves. That most of the clothes in the laundry are clothes their stuffed animals have worn.
“I don’t have any clean underwear,” he says.
“Maybe go check Mike Wazowski. He probably knows where some are,” I say.
Two minutes later, he comes back. “You were right, Mama!” he says. “Mike Wazowski had my underwear!”
And we laugh about it like it’s the funniest thing in the world.
I can let them have a little fun, I guess.
Until…
“Mama, this one’s a girl. I need some of your clothes this time,” one of them says.
Nope. Absolutely not. You are NOT raiding my underwear drawer.
I have to draw a line somewhere.
by Rachel Toalson | Messy Mondays
Sixty seconds, y’all. SIXTY SECONDS OF LEFT-ALONE TIME IS ALL IT TOOK FOR THE TWINS TO DO THIS.
I don’t even know what happened here, because they’re 3, and when I asked, it sounded like this:
Boaz: “Zaggit did it.”
Zadok: “NO! I DIDN’T!” (even though he was laid out on the floor with his foot stuck underneath the table and Boaz was clear across the room by the time I got down the stairs. Clearly implicated, Zadok.)
Me: “What happened, guys?”
Boaz: “Zaggit trying to move the table.”
Me: “Why? Why would you try to do that, Zadok?”
Zadok: “…”
These guys. I swear.
All I really know for sure is that I went upstairs to find a missing shoe, because we were already late to my older sons’ reading award ceremony, and dang it if the shoes went missing five minutes before we were supposed to leave. I was gone for no more than sixty seconds before I heard the crash. I thought about sliding down the stairs in the 4-year-old’s fort-box (because I still have a broken foot and walking downstairs quickly would probably end in a broken neck) until I saw that no one was seriously hurt.
These guys are truly the reason I’m one step away from crazy every single day.
I have a sneaking suspicion they want me to lose the battle.
So, on that note, anyone want to brave these twins for a while? They really aren’t that bad.
When they’re sleeping.
