It's Official

Getting back into running again after Everly was born has been slow and steady, but it's time to mark my calendar because...

I just registered for my second marathon! Des Moines October 17th, and I'm so excited.

I'm going to celebrate by doing a marathon of laundry. I'm sure there are at least 26.2 loads waiting for me.

Whew. I Need A Nap

It's monday morning. The whole family oversleeping was a telltale sign of the pace of this weekend. Let's racap.

1. Nate was gone all last week on the West Coast. I was reminiscing that back in the day, when he would travel I would do some sort of a big project. Mostly repainting a room or something like that. Now? It's just survival mode. I get lazy, don't cook, stay home, and wear sweatpants 24 hours a day. It's fun times. Kudos to you single moms or military wives. You are amazing.
2. You all delurked. That was amazing and a highlight of my week. What an excellent and diverse group of readers there are here. I drank a cup of coffee out of my snowman mug for each of you. And boy am I on a caffeine high!
3. My birthday was on Friday. The highlight? Wii telling me that I'm 24. I'm going with it. Nate got home that afternoon and we had a date night at Pizza Hut. Don't judge me, that's what I was hungry for. I'm fancy like that. Also there were two trips to Starbucks. What more could a girl want?
4. Saturday night was Gourmet Club. I'm sure I've told you about Gourmet Club before but I'm too lazy to go digging in the archives for it. We've been meeting for ten years now, which is CRAZY! Maybe that deserves a post of it's own. The food was great, the theme country was Peru. Yum.
5. Sunday was cram packed and very busy but we made room for a quick birthday party with my parents. My mom made Red Velvet Cake. There are a couple pieces sitting on my counter right now, taunting me. I'm ignoring them but I can't ignore them forever.
6. Also, I'm so proud of this:

There will be no "before" picture because while I can be pretty transparent, I do have my limits. Let's just say, the kids were very surprised at how much space there actually IS on the counter when it's not covered in everyone's junk. Also, obviously it's time for some banana bread. The little Nate/Heth salt shakers on the left deserve their own post.

Super fun weekend, but now it's laundry, laundry, laundry and will power practice, what with that cake screaming at me and everything. Maybe it will be a reward for each load I finish...

I've Been Keeping A Secret

If our life were a tv show, what would it be called?

How about:

Heth and Nate Plus Eight

Yep, exciting news around here. In August the Laundry Pile will expand by one more. We will attempt to answer the question "Is Eight really Enough?"

If You Have A Weak Stomach, Do Not Proceed

Sound asleep in bed at 3:30 am, I awake to a child standing beside my bed. There are two possible sentences this child will utter:

1: "Mom, I think I'm going to barf."

or

2:"Mom, I barfed."

Scenario 1 is a good scenario. I can now steer said child to the toilet and then easily flush away anything...offensive. Scenario 2 is a little more iffy. If the child is old enough, there is glimmer of hope that they made it to the toilet themselves. On the other hand, this one just might not turn out very pretty.

Last night was scenario 2 part B. And to make it even worse, in the child's own words..."Mom, it's BAD." Turns out it was the top bunk of the triple bunk, the loft. The loft that takes me 20 minutes and various contortionist moves just to make the bed. Here we have a middle of the night emergency with three sleeping brothers in the other beds. Happily, I managed to remove the sheets without waking anyone up or spraining my back. Sadly, he was right. It was BAD.

These are the moments that go unrecognized. No one is standing by your bedside applauding you as you return to sleep after a half an hour of cleaning up vomit. No one to thank you for providing middle of the night laundry and sanitizing services. So I would like to take this opportunity to thank all you moms everywhere. "GOOD JOB!", "You cleaned that up like a pro!", "If there were medals for this kind of thing, you get a gold.", "That was some amazing use of bleach skills."

There.

Consider yourselves cheered on.

Nudity Might Be A Good Idea

The answer to the question: "What are you doing today Heth?"

Everyone Needs a Match

I just got done sorting socks.

I ended up just dumping the sock basket in the middle of the floor and started matching. I am not exaggerating when I say that I ended up with 70 socks that did not have a match.

70.

Not seventeen, seventy.

Good gracious.

Boring Old Updates About Closets, So Much Fun

Because of my love for overpriced coffee, I busted out the closet painting as fast as humanly possible. It had to dry so I might as well make a trip to nearby town to have a beautiful Iced Caramel Macchiato. That is one pretty coffee drink, let me tell you. I never want to stir it up, I just want to look at it.



And look at that muffin. What I wouldn't give for one of those muffins right now...

Back to the closet.

So I'm in the process of The Big Organization of the Fall of 2008. Do not confuse this with The Great Organization of the Spring of 2008 or the Let's Get Organized 2007, or even The Laundry Pile Family Attempts Organization 2006. None of those were very big successes. But THIS will be successful. IT. WILL.

I don't have a photo of the closet before. Picture it with me. Small closet with bifold door. Shelf and rod about six feet up wit all three girls' hangables on it. Two dressers side by side inside the closet, one of the dressers missing a drawer. Not necessarily the best plan. So I bought this organizer thingy with the hopes that it would be a change for the better. We want to get rid of as many dressers as possible in order to maximize space. Maximizing space is the ultimate goal at this point.

The closet was painted and I attempted the assembly of the organizer, as Gemma would put it, "All by my fel-s" (self). I did a pretty good job and put the shelving system together without help. But I consider myself a wise woman in some manner and I knew when it was time to call in the big guns. Nate finished out the job of anchoring it to the wall and installing the rods.

I give you...The Girls' Closet:


This will be complimented with a large wardrobe on the other side of the room to house the rest of their clothes. It has yet to be assembled. But that is another post for another day.

Let's summarize:

• I painted the closet in a timely fashion.
• I was able to obtain my Starbucks drink in a timely fashion
• My girls now have a place to store their fashion.

My life is complete.

Updates

Since this blog has been mostly silent with the occasional post about vacation, I will update you on some of the goings on around the Laundry Pile this summer.

• First of all, the pile of laundry is fairly large right now. I'm hacking away at it one load at a time. That is when we are not at the pool.
  
• Toby learned to walk while we were on vacation. He's in that stumbly, out of balance, but still trying phase. It's completely adorable and I want to gobble him up.
• Jack is now 5. He had a birthday on the very day we were driving home from Northern Minnesota. I decorated his car seat with green balloons and streamers in an effort to win him over from the worst birthday situation possible, a whole day in the car.
• The kids just got back from "Grandma camp". They spent three days and two nights at my parents' house and we were childless. They made tie dyed shirts, played Frisbee golf, had a campfire, made a pinata, slept in a tent, and who knows what else. Nate and I went to a local water park without them and ate out as much as possible. Lots of Starbucks was consumed.
• I also took the child free opportunity to do some gardening. I made a new flower bed behind my garage. It was quite a sight, a crazy sweaty lady digging up her lawn. I do what I can to provide entertainment for the neighborhood.

In summary. Summer is good and I love it. Lots. Favorite season of the year hands down.

Truely The Laundry Lady

When I said I was avoiding the unpacking process, I wasn't kidding. I did most of the suitcases but quit part way through, choosing the pool instead.

We have gone the past two days.

In an attempt to simplify the take-the-troop-to-the-public-pool ordeal, I packed all of our stuff in a big laundry basket. I rolled up all the towels, threw in all the rest of the junk (snacks, sunscreen, phone, keys, etc) and we took off. While standing around, talking to a friend while the kids played, she told me what her 9 year old son had said when he saw us walking across the parking lot. "That Heather, she's pretty smart. She just brings her laundry to the pool!"

The kid is a genius. Next time I'm bringing along a load of whites and a jug of detergent.

A Bunch Of Stuff On a Tuesday Night

I long all winter for summer to come. I pine for sunny days, green grass, and bare feet. When it finally shows, I am faced with the same decision year after year. Housework or yard work? I much prefer yard work. I would rather mow, garden, or clean out the garage. Every year I plan that I will get ahead of the inside chores on those long winter days. My house will sparkle and by the time warm weather rolls around I will be able to sit and read on the deck in the sun, guilt free. It has yet to happen. And the balancing act begins. Do just enough inside so that I can do as much as possible outside. I am sporting the first signs of color on my shoulders after a day of being out in the yard. The pile of dirty laundry almost makes me want to pray for a cloudy rainy day to force myself back in. And reading blogs? That has taken a backseat. I'm so far behind, so sorry everyone.

In unrelated news, I found a recipe for a dish that everyone in the Laundry Pile Family enjoyed. It's far from the vegetable smorgasboard that they all rejected in February. No, this is right up their alley. A little something I like to call "Log 'O Cholesterol". It's that bad.

Let me tell you how to make it so that you can clog your family's veins. First brown up a pound of hamburger, some chopped onions, and some chopped bacon. Next, add 1/2 pound of Velveeta and stir until melted. Then grab a refrigerated pizza crust and unroll it on a cookie sheet. Spread the beef/cheese/bacon mixture on the dough. Roll it up forming a log of cholesterol. Bake it for 20 minutes at 400 degrees. Eat it and then prepare for the heart attacks.

One last thing. Quisp. I headed back to the store that I found it in and couldn't find anymore. So I asked the clerk. She said, "It's the weirdest thing, a lady came in just a few days ago and asked about it and bought 4 or 5 boxes. She said you have to order it on the internet."

Curious.

Luckily, she had one last box in the back and it was half price, bringing it to a whopping 50 cents. I'm not even kidding. Nate and I finished off the whole box tonight. I just want to know one thing. Who was it? Who cleaned out our little Dollar General store of all the Quisp? You don't have to embarrass yourself publicly, just send me an email and confess. I promise, I will forgive you.

Numbers

School was canceled today due to flash flooding. Let's do a little math of our own.

• Number of worms rescued from the street: at least 40
• Number of pairs of muddy boots on my deck: 8
• Number of times the mud people have had to change clothes: 3
• Number of times I have yelled to keep the mud outside: lost count
• Number of baths taken so far: 7
• Number of loads of laundry waiting to be washed: 9
• Number of timeouts given: lost count
• Number of times the words "I'm bored" has been uttered: lost count
• Number of pans of bars made by a bored teenager: 1
• Number of bars I plan to eat: not telling

A Deadly Mistake Averted

I stood in Target, mesmerized by the cuteness of shower curtains. They were on sale! There was a certain one that was calling out to me. It was bright, and fun, and...made out of fabric.

I reached for them, holding one in my arms, longing to put it in my cart. I had been wanting to spice up my bathroom a little bit. And then I remembered.

I have four boys.

Let's all stop for a minute and ponder the gravity of that statement in relationship to all things bathroom.

I suddenly realized the foolish path I was about to embark on. You see, our shower is in very, very close proximity to the toilet. I have found myself using antibacterial wipes to wipe down the plastic shower curtain daily. My sons need a lesson, a lesson in aiming.

And so I put the pretty cloth shower curtain back safely on the shelf.

Can you imagine? *gag*

"Sheer Spring" All over My Carpet

Sometimes you have a nice little road map for the day but then something happens that jerks the wheel out of your hands, hits the gas, and takes you down a completely different road?

I had a list. It was a to do list. One of the things on that list was laundry. (Always) My kids had been complaining..."Mom, I don't have any jeans clean." and "Where are all the socks?" So I got the ball rolling and starting hitting the laundry hard this morning. I threw a particularly large load of jeans in the washing machine and then moved on to shamrock pancake/syrup cleanup upstairs in the kitchen. That's when the party started. A laundry party that I wasn't invited to.

The dryer was a dryin' and the washer was a washin' and the whole place was a rockin'. It seems that the sassy little bottle of liquid fabric softener got a little carried during the spin cycle and she shimmied herself right off the top of the washing machine onto the floor. The lid cracked. A significant amount of "Sheer Spring" oozed all over the concrete and carpet in front of the machines. In that moment my steering wheel was jerked from my hands. I have spent a large portion of my day battling the powers of fabric softener. The carpet smells fantastic. And no static cling!


Sheer spring? It's a whole lot more lovely outside.

What I Did Today

So many days I crash onto my pillow with one last thought before I immediately become unconscious. "What was it that I did all day?" Sometimes is obvious. Grocery store stock up. Chauffeuring children around town in the Beast. Doing laundry. Wait, that's all day, everyday. Or at least it feels that way.

Right now it is shortly after noon and I am assessing the past 6.5 hours. Of course there is no possible way I can account for every second but here are some highlights from a morning of thrills.

• Spent some time at the gym, making up for my Weekend 'O Sweets.
• Survived the daily 45 minutes of chaos of waking, feeding, dressing, and nagging children and then herding them to the car to be deposited at their respective schools.
• Devotions. Fought the the ironic trap of yelling at the kids while reading the Bible. "Leave Mommy alone already! I'm trying to spend some time with God!"
• Fulfilled my daily required amount of Wii refereeing. All the while trying to suppress laughter when Jack blames his losses on me. "You made me die Mom. My guy dies when you talk."
  
• Daydreamed about banana bread for at least 10 minutes in 5 second increments, wishing I wouldn't have eaten the last piece yesterday.
• Resorted 576 Apples to Apples cards back into their box from the dumped-out pile on the kitchen table. It's a tolerable task if done while watching Nacho Libre with preschoolers. "My favorite color is light tan."
• Fed the children a lunch of chips and salsa. Appropriate don't you think, considering our morning movie choice?
• Spent approximately 30 minutes (give or take) *cough* on the Internet.
  

It's never the same thing around here, but it's always guaranteed to be enthralling. And if I run out of exciting things to do, there's always the laundry. Wheeeee!

Christmas 2007- In the Form of a List

Nothing is as easy as writing a list and so I give you our Christmas recap, with bullet points.

Lazy, yes.

I never said I wasn't.

• 6 Christmases in 4 days.
• Ann, Eric, and their three kiddos come back from distant lands. Hooray!
• Ann falls to the power of the stomach flu. (So sorry Ann. It's definitely the gift that keeps on giving.)
• The tradition of Grandma Margaret's famous Christmas cookies continues.
  
• Wii!
• Heth freaks out and has a Christmas meltdown, succumbing to the stress of her role as Super Christmas Coordinator. (Did I mention 6 Christmases in 4 days?)
  
• Heth recovers from her meltdown with the tried and true remedy of staying in her pajamas until evening and eating lots of sugar.
• A nativity scene made solely from pancakes.
  
• A precious Christmas morning at my parents'. Teary eyes and family all around.
• Dave (my parents' foreign exchange student) joins in the Christmas craziness.
• We survive the annual wrapping paper war and my Grandparents' house.
  
• Nate and Heth assume the roles of Wii refrees while the children play Wii sports.
• Toby learns to sit unassisted.
  
• Toby eats cereal for the first time. It's one step from sugar cookies.
  
• So much snow.
• Soooo much laundry.

Tuesday

This post is going to rock your socks off.

Really it's not. It's just a list of pretty much nothing. Let's get started.

1. The laundry is reproducing. I'm sure of it. I knew there was a reason to "separate" it, it's really just to keep it from multiplying.
   
2. Three of my children insist on taking their shoes off the minute they sit down in the van. I won't tell you which three. It was tolerable in the summer, even kind of cute. Now that there are socks and boots and sloppy snow/slushy/mud/muck involved, it's really, really annoying. REALLY annoying.
   
3. Toby is catching a cold. He has a well baby check later this week. Kind of ironic I think.
4. Shopping for a winter coat for a 12 year old is a whole new ball game.
   
5. I love my new living room decorated for Christmas. Love it.
6. It doesn't have to be a holiday or a special occasion to eat pecan pie for breakfast. Just in case you were wondering. And once piece isn't enough. Go for the second slice.

Barf

Disclaimer: this post is not for the faint of heart. If you have a weak stomach, click away right now.

Mother's have a sixth sense. They can be standing in the kitchen, hear a noise coming from upstairs, and within a split second they can recognize it as a child vomiting from the top bunk. It is a very distinct sound.

This evening, after all the kids were in bed, Nate and I heard that very sound. We sprinted upstairs to find a top bunk dweller losing their supper right over the edge of the bed, directly onto the mattress that we pull out from under the bunk beds. Thankfully the mattress was uninhabited. The little one who usually sleeps on that mattress had decided to climb in bed with the person who sleeps in the bottom bunk. Good decision. Very, very good decision. That situation had the potential to be life scarring. Therapy could have been needed. Can you imagine?

I set to work on the grand cleanup and tried to look for the silver lining. Here is what I came up with.

1. The mattress that the barf landed on was empty of all sleeping humans. *phew*
2. The mattress is a crib mattress and is covered in plastic. YAY!
3. Halleluia for steam cleaners.
4. Halleluia for clorox wipes.

It is in these moments that big questions must be answered. One being, "Did these sheets just become disposable?" Yes. I believe they did.

*As soon as I finished typing the last word, middle bunk kid barfed all over the bedroom floor. I am not even kidding. Forget everything I just said about silver lining. There is nothing good about barf. This is going to be an awesome night, I can tell.*

Puzzles

Being a mother requires the ability to put together unusual puzzles.

You start off simple, poring over and analyzing every word on the directions to the pregnancy test. What does one line mean? What do two mean? Did I do it right? Is that a faint pink I see or am I just imagining it.

Then you jump to a super advanced puzzle. The re-assembly of a newly washed car seat. Difficulty level: 10. Heaven forbid your little precious should spill ketchup while eating french fries in the van, or that they should barf. It's inevitable, you will eventually have to take that thing apart and wash it and then pull out your hair putting it back together.

There are the obvious puzzles involved in parenting. Little wooden ones with pictures of animals and numbers, then later 250, 500, and 1,000 piece puzzles. The kind you set up the card table for. The kind that toddlers love to ruin.

But yesterday I attempted a new kind of puzzle in my mothering journey. The challenge? Inserting football pads into football pants. The seventh grade football season has begun and after two weeks of practice, the pants finally left their home in the locker to be de-grass stained for the first game. I'm sure once they left the locker room, they breathed deeply of the fresh air, no longer surrounded by the stench of pubescent seventh grade boy sweat. I hit them hard with the Oxy-Clean and once they were clean I realized that they needed to be reassembled. A belt and seven interestingly shaped pads were involved and I won! Another puzzle conquered.

Dryer Diving

My dryer has slowly started to take it's precious time drying our clothes. It's been a fabulous slave of mine, I work it very hard. It was time to crack the whip.

This morning I used muscles I didn't even know I had and I pulled and tugged on the dryer until it was spun completely around and away from wall. I had Noelle, who is about two inches wide, squeeze back there and start pulling things out from behind while I took the vent tube off and started digging for wayward lint. Good times.

Our spoils included 24 hangers that were playing hooky behind the dryer. We have a dowel hanging above the washer and dryer and I hang all shirts up there. It is just out of reach of the children so when they want a shirt to wear (since we never put laundry away), they yank on the sleeve of the shirt until it comes down, sending the hanger flying. All hangers have been retrieved.

I dug out enough lint to a stuff a small throw pillow. Now there's a craft for a lazy summer afternoon. Lint Pillows.

Switching to an unrelated topic, or so you would think, here is a picture I took last fall of our new sand box.

We were going for a natural look. We strategically planted big boulders to keep the sand contained and I planted lots of perennials around the boulders. It doesn't look so sparse this summer, the plants have all grown and filled in, it really looks great. The kids love to bring small rocks and leaves and sticks to the sandbox to make little "meals" and various other interesting concoctions. Now notice the small white box at the top of the photo. You see where I'm going with this don't you?

Sand. There was plenty of sand present in the ventilation tube. And also three golf ball sized rocks. I'm honestly surprised that is all I found stuffed down the hole. I fully expected to find a half eaten peanut butter and jelly sandwich.

Now I am enjoying the quiet hum of my newly cleaned out dryer. Dry away little buddy. And I can rest in the peace of mind that our house is not going to go up in flames due to a rock/lint stuffed dryer vent. Because those are the things I worry about.

Change

We have had a big life change at the Laundry Pile house. I've been putting off posting the news, not because I'm not excited about it or didn't want you all to know, but because there are so many different ways I could write about it. I just haven't been sure which way to go.

I could take the laundry route and say it this way, " I'm going to be washing a clergy cassock now and I'm not sure if those are dry clean only or not."

Or I could take a super-spiritual route and explain how God has completely directed even the smallest details of our lives and continues to do so in ways that just amaze us, including this new path. Especially in this new path.

Or I could just come right out and say it: Nate quit his "regular" job and has accepted the Pastor of Student Ministries position at our church. He has worked with the youth for almost 8 years and now it's his full time job. We are thrilled.

As we approached this decision, we had to answer some hard questions. The three questions I personally wanted answers for pertained to being a pastor's wife.

1. Do I have to wear pantyhose all the time? Even when I'm scrubbing the toilet?
2. Are there any secret casserole recipes I should know about?
3. Do I need to know how to play the organ?

Just so you know, Nate doesn't need to wear a cassock. Most days he leaves the house in a t-shirt and shorts. I know you were wondering.

This really has been an amazing time. The last three months or so have been a pivotal point in our lives. God has shown Himself to be so trustworthy. I have learned that He not only guides the big moments but also cares about every little detail. I know that sounds so cliche, but it became real to me through this transition. Like I said at the beginning. I don't even know how to write about this. I'm having a hard time putting all of my feelings into words. So like Mary, when she had a big event in her life, (the birth of our Savior!) I think I will just stick to pondering all these things in my heart.