I’m pooped.
I laid down for almost an hour this afternoon when my mom came to visit but aside from that I didn’t stop moving the entire weekend.
I really worked on projects. First up, because it’s March in Houston, it means summer is nearly here. So winter clothes had to be packed away (while my girlfriend was voxing me about snow melt, I had the kids trying on last year’s shorts) and clothes had to be sorted. I dumped all the drawers out and reorganized them – how many times have I done this with explicit instructions to keep it in tact and yet each season I find myself cross-legged on the floor repeating the process.
I filled a box full of little bit’s things for a cousin and bagged the boy’s things for Goodwill. (Y’all, seriously with the growing!?!?) I’d found a few summer items on sale so those had to be incorporated and exclaimed over.
I did loads of laundry and scrubbed the kitchen just in time for us to completely trash it with a baking experiment. As you may have read, the kids adore Kids Baking Championship, so they are now officially practicing for when they are eligible to try out in four years. The baby’s plea for this weekend’s experiment was apple pie. We made the crust from scratch (my first) and the boys worked from start to finish while little bit napped. The kitchen looked like a tornado hit it, but the pie was delicious!
By the time that was cleaned up and we had all showered, it was almost time for our friends to arrive so we could go to the ostrich and camel races at the Race Park. Mercy does Houston have creative entertainment. Aside from all the smokers outside, the kids had a blast playing together and I got catch up time with my friend. What we didn’t know was that the ostriches didn’t race until after the fourth horse race (after 8 pm) and the camels didn’t race until after the seventh horse race (who knows when), so the kids were told that the camels may have been too tired to race and we headed home after the ostrich hilarity before the crowd got too out of control.
Sunday was church and grocery shopping and all of the meal cooking (they eat three times a day – just when you’ve started to repair the damage from the first meal, it’s time to turn around and do it all over again, your house too?) and pulling down the old Valentine’s decor to replace it all with the Easter decor and then daddy came home and we all talked over each other for supper and everyone wanted bubble baths…
I surveyed the house after his arrival and looked over with a shrug and said, I actually worked on this house all weekend.
You couldn’t tell. Even after two go rounds, the kids rooms still looked uneven at best. The play room had a farm in development. The kids corner library also had some sort of art project in progress, even though art projects are supposed to stay in the kitchen eating room. And our room, well my suitcase from last weekend was unpacked, but otherwise I’d not spent any time in there except to sleep with three buddies.
I started to get frustrated until I remembered the wise words of my ostrich racing cohort. When I asked how she found all these quirky activities in the city, she said, “I want to take advantage of this small window of time where my kids are old enough that I don’t have to worry about diapers and naps, but still young enough to want to do stuff with dear old mom as opposed to hanging out with their friends.”
It’s a small window.
I worked on the house, but it still looks like three six year olds live here.
We had so much fun together though. They’ll remember the peanut butter and banana pancakes. They’ll remember learning about hope in the Sunday School class I taught. The boys will have rolled out their first homemade pie crust with mom. We’ll still be laughing about the smoker the baby stared down behind us until he moved as the baby responded, “THANK YOU for moving!” They now know how to play dodgeball because mom taught them Saturday morning against the driveway fence. We’ll have stories about how jockeys fall off of ostriches because there is nothing to hold on to.
And maybe they’ll remember the mess too. But hopefully it will be memories of how our house was really, truly lived in – with kid art work hung on the walls and bean bags strew on the floor and marks all over the kitchen table.
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