I have three basic rules in our home. These three rules were created with the consideration of everyone’s wellbeing in mind. 1. Don’t eat in the living room
2. Don’t jump on the furniture 

3. Don’t make Max do THAT SCREAM! (It’s his “someone is doing something to me just to make me scream” scream…and it is grating!) 

There are other rules…basic “obey your parents, be nice to each other” kinda rules…but those are more unspoken. The above three are ones that need to be constantly re-recognized and re-enforced. 

Tonight after I got home from a long day at the Farmers Market peddling my wares, I caught a glimpse of a “situation” in the corner behind the hanging basket chair. Surely it couldn’t be what it looked to be? I stepped closer…it was, in fact exactly what it looked to be. It was a small pile of shredded cheddar cheese…with a pair of discarded dirty socks also peppered into the pile. It was like a little tossed salad of cheese shreds and dirty socks. It was evident that someone went to the trouble to scoot the pile into the corner, almost making it unnoticeable, until you do a double take and you’re like “wait a minute, is that dirty socks and shredded cheese over there?” I was like, “For real guys? Who was eating shredded cheese out here and then dropped a bunch and then also got the urge to take off their sweaty socks and throw those into the cheese pile?” I even imagined that maybe the person was using their foot to scoot all the cheese together and then realized they were too rough with the cheese and their feet were too warm and they now had crushed and melted cheese to their socks.   Everyone told on Micah in unison. Micah sullenly retrieved his socks and then got the vacuum out and cleaned up the cheese pile. He also did a few other chores, just for showing such open disregard for the house rules. 

Within the half hour Chris was sitting beside me on the couch with his guitar in hand and we were singing a song about a pile of cheese and dirty socks in the corner of our living room. There was even a lyric about Micah spinning around in the hanging basket chair and imagining that the mess must surely be gone, since it was no longer in his immediate view. Lemonade, from lemons. Or in this case, we’ll say we made New York Cheese Cake out of a dirty, cheesy sock pile.  

You wanna know what’s more fun than approaching puberty with your hastily maturing 10 year old?…Approaching it with your open and talkative boy/girl 10 year old twins…that’s what.  I can handle it. I’m proudly admitting that.  Chris gets a little skeeved out occasionally, but we’re both keeping it together.  I’m trying to maintain the mindset that…

1. There are no stupid questions.  (Sometimes I’ve second guessed this statement, but then I’ve had a few questions of my own of which I believed could have been classified as “stupid” and I had to rethink my judgment on my initial disbelief of the statement.)  In my own life, some questions have taken a level of bravery for me to ask and I want to respect that in my own children.  I would rather them WANT to ask me and feel safe with what they believe my response will be than to be afraid to ask for fear that I would cause them to feel embarrassed or ashamed.  Sometimes I think with this specific topic, my biggest fear is watching my kids discover something that could potentially strip away an innocence that is all I’ve ever known from them.  I think sometimes I’m actually the one who’s afraid…of letting go.

2.  I like to keep things as medical as possible but also throw in some light humor occasionally to keep things airy and comfortable while still conveying a heaviness, aware of my responsibility to properly communicate something deeply important.  I was surprised that the puberty talk ended up bringing up unexpected topics like “If a man and a woman have sex to have babies then how come this kid in my class says he doesn’t have a dad?”  Suddenly there is A LOT to cover.

My kids had a lot of knowledge on the topic prior to the talk that took place yesterday at school.  Iris had a few months earlier expressed to me that she felt like she might have a bruise on her chest cause whenever she got hit in the chest it hurt.  She has four brothers, having also grown up with four brothers I remember it well…wrestling around and getting hit in the chest.  I was like, “Oh, wow.  You’re growing breasts.”  And we discussed more in depth a topic we’ve discussed at length one other time, cause now there was actually living proof of what was said to come.  She was only slightly creeped out…just gave a mild, “Ugggggh, I don’t wanna grow boobs.”  And once when Flynn seemed interested in a discussion after some hearsay that some other kids he knew were starting to “stumble upon” images that were less than savory on the internet we chose then to engage Flynn about the topic of sex and maturity.  I think you would rather them know from you than from the internet.

Sadly the age of sexual awareness is occurring much sooner than it used to as the tech becomes more accessible to children…This is the #1 reason our kids don’t freely operate any screens in our house.  I’m the screen nazi with the kids.  Thankfully “screens” are expensive so we don’t have the option to have many around, but the few in the home are on tight lockdown.  Coming from someone who has witnessed “screen wrath” from my children, (like when you disconnect them and it takes them a while to snap out of it and then they’re all miserable and can’t seem to figure out anything to do besides the thing that you just took away from them…so you start kindly suggesting the options of things that they may do that don’t include staring straight into an eventful abyss and none of your options are good enough and they have to go off by themselves and figure out that life goes on without this thing and the withdrawal isn’t fun…to witness or be the victim of.)  We literally keep our TV in the basement and bring it up for the occasional movie night.  There just isn’t room for it in our life.  (Physically…I’m not devoting one whole corner/wall/room of our much overused living area into an altar to the television while they’re young.  I need that space to hang their handicrafts!  And figuratively…by the time four kids have completed their homework and helped with dinner and cleaned up from dinner and practiced piano and played with Max and gathered their dirty laundry and maybe even put away a load of their clean laundry and unloaded the dish washer and spent some time reading and taken a shower and had 2 papers signed by a parent and had a bedtime story and said goodnight…there is scarcely room for a minute of television.

!SMALL RABBIT TRAIL! Do you have a HUGE AMOUNT OF TIME YOU WOULD LIKE TO SEE CONSUMED?  Have a big family!  The maintenance alone of 6 (lets be real, sometimes meeting the basic needs of even one other person can be taxing in todays’ society) or 5 or 4 people inside the same four walls can be overwhelming.  We are getting closer and closer to having a system so that one is not doing the work of many (getting pregnant again helps with that…I’m becoming physically unable to bend down to pick up other peoples’ underwear off the bathroom floor, so I go the extra mile and rather than just bending over and grabbing them I opt instead to alert the owner to their underwear on the bathroom floor so they may remedy the situation.  Pregnancy helps me to put selfcare higher on my priority list.  I’ll be ‘better to me for my baby” kinda thing.  There are certain things a pregnant woman bends over for…someone else’s dirty underwear it turns out, isn’t one of them.  So what I’m saying is that I become a much better delegator while I’m pregnant and Chris really helps with this also by sensing my needs and prompting people who would otherwise be sprawled out on the floor reading Calvin and Hobbes, to go help their mom.

So yesterday I picked the 4 older kids up from school while my neighbor friend sat at home with napping Max.  The moment that Iris’ butt hit the seat she informed me “We had the puberty talk today…they gave us a packet with pictures.”  Owen (6) was already in the vehicle and Micah (8) was hopping in next.  We looped back down to the street to avoid backing up traffic in front of the school while we waited for Flynn to emerge from the school doors.  Iris was sitting forward in her seat, saying things like “When they said that your boobs would grow and they would feel sore and I was like “UUHHH…” and she made this face, where she turns the corners of her mouth as far down as humanly possible, think “extreme clown frown” on the cutest, hippest, prettiest, most creative little girl (I’m naturally biased)…her sense of humor is like no other.  I nonchalantly said,

“Well, they told you how you have to put huge bandaids and ice packs on them, right?”

She flung herself back into the seat while her body took over with laughter.  She was officially, “puberty-talk-giddy”.  When Flynn hopped in the vehicle in was quiet for a moment, but the spirit was already in the air…barrier breached.

“Mom, they talked to us about puberty today.”

“I know, Iris told me…how’d it go?”

“It was weird, they told us our penises are going to grow…”

At this, the entire vehicle erupts with laughter.  I knew it was pointless to have any kind of a serious conversation with Tweedle Dee (Micah) and Tweedle Dum (Owen) in the car with us.

Flynn spoke when the laughter stopped,

“They told us about how babies are made…why would they tell us about that during the puberty talk?”

He had a genuine look of confusion on his face.  We’ve talked about how babies are made at our house.  When you make them as often as we do, you have some explaining to do.  Flynn wasn’t making the connection between going thru puberty and making babies.

“Well, making babies is the only reason we go thru puberty.  Your body changes and the way you feel about a person changes because we are supposed to make babies with each other.”  I was trying to keep everything G rated with the younger boys in tow. This is when Micah chimed in that there is a kid in his class who doesn’t have a dad, so how did he get made?

I took this as an opportunity to get a little deeper …even promote a little friendly abstinence…

“What that means is that someone wanted to have sex, because it feels good, but they didn’t want to do the really important job that often comes with having sex…which is being a parent.”

People were quiet while they thought about it…I continued…

“Basically, if you aren’t ready to be a mom or a dad, you shouldn’t be having sex.  It’s a very important decision to make.”

I did not go on to tell them that Chris and I were in fact virgins on our wedding day.  It was mostly by default.  Turns out that being exceedingly afraid of your father can have positive effects on your abstinence success rate.  Call it whatever you want…being terrified of maybe having to tell my dad that I was pregnant was 100% the reason that I “saved it” for my wedding day.  I also knew that an occurrence that should be welcomed joyfully could, at the wrong time, be an actual life destroyer.  I watched my parents struggle to no end to provide for myself and my four brothers, while dealing with legal troubles and substance and addiction.  My childhood neighbors have told me they can recall me with a twin brother on each hip, contributing more than my share to help lighten the load on my mother who was left to find work at night at a gas station after my father was incarcerated for dealing marijuana.  I don’t have this memory.  I only remember life feeling heavy, worry forcing maturity before my time.  Being the second oldest and the only female of my siblings, a lot of maternal responsibility was placed on my small frame.  Looking back with the information that the past 12 years has afforded me, and recognizing not only my fertility but also my record for hatching multiples…Chris and I have discussed many times what premarital sex could have ended like for us.  Twins at age 16.  Thank you God, for my fear.  Happily married with twins at age 22 was a wild enough ride…I don’t want to think about that amount of responsibility in any other scenario.

While continuing to steer us in the direction of the grocery store to pick up spaghetti and meatball ingredients, Iris kind of whispered in my direction…

“They gave us stuff to put in our underwear…”

Having given Iris panty liners (Ewe…I know…I despise the word “panty”) sometime last year, I know she is familiar with them and simply wanted to address the weirdness of discussing this among her peers, I responded the only way I knew how…

“Oh, you mean like crumbled up newspaper and leaves and stuff…?”

Again, she has lost control of her body while flailing with laughter.  I am also deeply enjoying a laugh.

Puberty giddiness simmered down and I ran into the grocery store for a few things.  (I don’t even want to know what conversation took place between them all while I was absent from the vehicle) Next, I dropped Iris and Micah off at piano practice and returned home to proceed with dinner preparations.

Owen and Max were pleasantly occupied with the wooden train set when Flynn entered the kitchen and asked,

“Can I help you with dinner?”

I was only slightly surprised, because frankly he is an extremely helpful and responsible boy.

“Sure, you wanna chop green pepper for the meat balls?”

He is pleased with this suggestion (he loves any excuse to use a knife) and gets right to work.

Naturally the previously abandoned conversation picks back up as I realize that Flynn hasn’t had all of his questions answered.  I can’t recall exactly how it came back up but he round aboutly reopened the “SEX TALK” door and I made it a little more personal for him, which wasn’t hard as I stood there with my apron ill fitting over a 5 month pregnant belly.

“Obviously, your dad and I have sex…because we keep making babies.  I love your dad very much and and I love the kids that we make and he loves me and that’s one of the most important parts of having sex.  I hope that someday you meet someone that you love and enjoy and laugh with as much as I do with your dad…and maybe you will want to spend your life with that person and make a family with them.”

He digs deeper, looking up from the cutting board out the side of his eyes while he awkwardly asks,

“But mom, when do you and dad DO it?”

At this point I would like to point out a very endearing quality of Flynn’s…he’s just a practical guy.  He’s literally thinking…”my parents are so busy, they rarely even sit down…they have five kids…they are constantly meeting our needs…when are they engaging in SEX?”(which he most likely believes to be some type of long, drawn out wrestling match)

I can’t help but laugh because I know he’s having trouble believing we have the time to fit this into our busy life.

“Are you looking for dates and times?!”

He is now laughing at his own question as well, and adds “Well, when you were pregnant with Max I just thought that you guys did it when you took us to AWANA…”

Now I’m laughing uncontrollably, this day just keeps getting better.

“Yeah Flynn, for two hours every Wednesday…we’re just having sex!”

Once I settled down I made some things clear to Flynn,

“You do know that we go to the same room and sleep in the same bed every night, right?”

“Yeh, but I just never knew…”

“It also doesn’t take THAT long…we fit it in.”

My only real victory in that parenting moment was keeping the door open for all future awkward topics to be welcomed and embraced.  We continued our meatball mission and the conversation lightened up.  I was impressed that Flynn stuck with me thru adding the eggs and the parsley and the parmesan cheese and the chopped garlic and  all the seasonings to the burger.  I often deal with kitchen helpers that lose interest and abandon their post leaving me to not only complete whatever I am in the middle of but then also to finish the job that they were doing.  We put the first baking sheet of meatballs in the oven when Flynn came out with it…

“Can I have 3 bucks mom?”

“Ha! I might have known!  What do you want with 3 bucks?”

“I want to send myself some candy-grams…”  (A fun holiday extra that is offered at school… you can spend a little money to have candy canes or chocolate dipped marshmallows sent to friends.)

“Sure.  You just earned your 3 dollars worth of candy-grams, but could you at least think about sending one to a friend instead of only sending them to yourself…?”

“Yea.  I will.”

Flynn runs off to start his reading homework.  Iris and Micah come through the front door with Chris who has retrieved them from piano lessons.

Chris, just like every evening, is stormed by the children.  Max runs to greet him, his unignorable cuteness immediately producing  an octave heightened change in Chris’ voice while he emits pure pleasure in the direction of our youngest blessing.  Owen has cornered Chris, who is now holding Max, to insist he listen to him read aloud from a wildlife coloring book that he’s been obsessed with for about 3 days.  (Owen is our strongest 1st grade reader yet, and we tell him all the time, so he is constantly keeping us aware of his progress.)  Flynn and Micah have taken to “light wrestling” in the living room.  I’m feeling the relief that comes every night when Chris walks through the door.  I’ve said it before, I know, but I’ll say it again.  Motherhood is an agreement, to enter into constant communication with your children.  It is the most communication I have ever known, and it is usually coming from 5 directions.  Often times I don’t even have time to respond to one question before the next one is asked.  When Chris walks in the door, there becomes two receivers of the constantly transmitted sound waves of our children.  It makes such a huge difference, mentally…to have one more person to field some of the wants, the needs, the stories, the complaints, the praise and the knock knock jokes that fly around a busy, full house.  I am pouring spaghetti sauce in the pot to start warming it for dinner.

I feel her presence enter my otherwise empty kitchen.  She has just had a little more than a 1 hour break from the “puberty talks”…I however have not.  I have been in this kitchen continuing all puberty deliberations for the past hour with Flynn.  It is silent only long enough for me to expect what is coming next…MORE.  She wastes no time.  No report from piano lessons, no snack request…she is plagued with the weight…

“They gave us a packet that had pictures, Mom…”

She mentioned this earlier but we never got to dissect it.

“Oh yea?”  Lets just get on with it already!!

“There was this page that had a bunch of pictures of vaginas…” Her face is offering a look of complete disgust as she continues…

“First there was a little one…” she holds up her thumb and index finger to show me how small the picture was.

“Then next to that was one that was a little bit bigger and then one that was a little bit bigger and had a little hair on it and then there was this BIG ONE and it was all covered with HAIR!” Somehow her face has become even more disgusted looking.

I can’t help myself…

“Ewe! Like some kind of a little MONSTER or something!”  She is losing her mind in hysterics again.  If we can’t laugh our way thru this stage, then we actually might not make it thru at all.

I believe the reason that most of this seemed so comical to me is simply because most all of it has already been addressed with Flynn and Iris individually.  They were actually only struggling with the level of openness with which it was spoken about among their peers.  At one point on our earlier ride home, Iris was begging me…

“But WHY do they have to talk about it with us at SCHOOL!?”

I told her that every adult knows that this is going to happen to a healthy, developing young person.  It is as natural as breathing.  Imagine if a kid didn’t have a parent at home who wanted to talk about it with their child, or if they forgot to talk about it (I almost did, because your kids are always your “kids” and then one day signs and symptoms of their unavoidable maturity start presenting themselves and you just know what you have to do.) or God forbid, what if they don’t have someone close to them in their life to talk with them about it.  I asked Iris,

“Wouldn’t it be a little scary if your body was changing and you didn’t know what was going on?  What if you thought there was something wrong with you, or that you were sick.”

It seems a little funny at first, and then before you know it you’re a woman or a man and you are at home in your skin and BAM you have 5 kids! (The exception, not the rule…but my point is made.)

Who is ever ready for their baby (or babies!) to leave behind the childish innocence that is so evident in our underdeveloped pre-pubescent sweethearts?  This past week has slapped me in the face with how brief our time with our babies actually is.  They deserve to be informed and respected while they go thru the sacred and sometimes icky real life of maturity.  We have so many awkward years ahead, but even those will speed past.  I look forward to holidays surrounded by my adult children, and their children and I want to remember how much fun it actually was to help guide them to adulthood.  I will always long for the days when their heads were bobbly melons on top of their stubby, inefficient little bodies.  For now I get to watch them bound across basketball courts and glide down the alley on skateboards and strategically slide fingers over piano keys.  I am thankful to be given the opportunity to handle with care and love, their passage to adulthood.

A BRIEF DISCLAIMER…if in the future we are to meet and I mention that the twins aren’t speaking to me, it will most likely be because they found and read this blog post and just haven’t forgiven me yet.  I love you Flynn and Iris…our firsts…our dual practice round.  MWAH!

Today while I was sweeping up Max’s partially wet eggs from the kitchen floor, I decided there is a topic of which there is not enough information and research and study concerning…  THIS.  The day in and day out of being a houseworking, care taking, mother of many.  While maintaining the kitchen I thought about the top twenty things I would rather be doing than grabbing globs of jelly with a paper towel from the table top…one being to simply go clean a different room of the house.  I’ve been trying to go thru the kids clothes to weed out the stuff that’s too small or too beat or just not a favorite.  No-one is answering the question, “Hey, hows it going?”, with “Oh fine, I recently ate a soggy cheerio off of my toddler because I was too far from a garbage can and I didn’t want to put it down somewhere I had just cleaned…”  Some days I really try to boycott this monotonous bull crap of just maintaining a life that is lived hard and heavy by just NOT doing any of it…no load of laundry, no dishwasher run, no effort to “keep up”.  I’ll just leave! Run errands! Go to a park! Pack a lunch!  And you know what happens?!  It gets worse.  And its so boring.  Catching back up on all of it.  BORED TO DEATH.  Clearly, I would rather write about the monotony of the housework than actually perform it.  I imagine that someday we will make enough money to hire someone to do all the stuff I hate doing.(HAHAHAHAHA!!!)  So here feels like a nice place to draw others into the stimulating, captivation and secret happenings of the everyday housewife.  Because lets be real, no-one wants to read your Facebook post about how you’ve spent half the day trying to find your third washbasket so you can get on with your day…did you fill it with junk and put it in the basement to hide it from humans outside the family?  Is it buried in the boys room?  Did I leave it at the storage unit the last time I used it to transport my “small business” inventory?  We all have that one friend who will listen to us vent about cracking our head on the underside of our six year olds bed while trying to fish his teddy bear collection from underneath the bed…in an effort to someday find the floor of this room and therefore vacuum it this quarter.  That friend is just being nice, because she knows she’s about to do the exact same thing to you, except her story is going to involve feces and a sudden and intersecting realization that the wipes AND the paper towels stores have recently been fully depleted.  Let’s not forget about when the kids all rush in the door after school, daily discarding shoes and backpacks at various locations ALL OVER THE WHOLE HOUSE!!!

Tonight while Chris and I were in the kitchen, he was throwing some spaghetti together while I was finally rounding a corner on getting all the laundry done and everyone’s clothes weeded through…I mentioned that I don’t know what to do with the boys underwear when I do the laundry.  (Three underwear utilizers, different ages…similar sizes…same colors) “I’m just going to make a pile of underwear and tell them all they have to find their underwear…”

Chris replied, “I know! Why don’t you put them in a brown paper bag and then put it on a shelf in the pantry closet.  That sounds like a good place…”

I did this recently to their entire collection of socks.  I was in the middle of THE GREAT SOCK MATCHING!…when something more urgent presented itself and most likely included the use of one of the only work surfaces in the entire home and therefore I took ALL the socks, the ones that had been matched and the ones left solo and threw them all into a brown grocery bag and promptly put it out of my sight.  How else was I going to get on with my life?  And there it stayed for more than a week.  Occasionally someone would whine about not being able to find any socks and I’d chime in “Brown paper bag on the shelf in the pantry closet…”  One day Chris overheard me give this answer to a troubled, sockless youth and he was like “What?”

If that right there doesn’t sum up what my life feels like at most times, I don’t know what does.  Once you keep your socks in a brown bag in the pantry long enough, it starts to feel normal.  The bag did start ripping and the first time that I had to bend over and pick an array of socks up from the pantry closet floor I got on with the long neglected chore of sorting and matching and discarding household socks.  And thankfully, the kids are always on their toes.  I can’t even say anyone would question a bag of their underwear in the pantry.  They are at least becoming slightly aware that I am the only human filter they have right now and the moment they start complaining about my filing system is the moment I announce that I don’t see a need to touch their socks at all any more.  They’ve become quite tolerant of the total upheaval that can be the rearranging of their rooms or their furniture or their roommates all with the intention to fit better and more harmoniously.  One big giant science experiment! Oh, and the boredom thing…moving everything around seems to satisfy my constant need to be experiencing something different and new without ever leaving my house.

This afternoon while I sat on my bedroom floor…finishing the sorting of the socks, Iris came in from school…the rest of her brothers decided to accompany Chris to the storage unit for some work related something or other.  She sat on the floor next to me and chatted and chatted.  She told me that she doesn’t like to have a favorite teacher because she thinks it would be mean to the other teachers.  “There are these girls who are like ‘Oh, Mrs.Reigert is our favorite teacher!” and I’m just like ‘poor Mrs.Hoffman…maybe her feelings are hurt…’  I told her that was nice of her. If I only get one girl out of all this labor of love, I’m so glad its her.

At supper tonight Flynn made it very clear how he feels about the “Lunchable” option at the cafeteria.  “I wish that the guy that invented lunchables would have invented them when he was a kid, cause then he would have eaten them and he would have known that it is not enough food for a kid.”  This is where I will confess that at Flynn’s last “Well Child” check up I asked his doctor how I would know if the boy had a tape worm…?  He looked at me a little bewildered and assured me that 10 year old boys do start to develop quite an appetite. Little does Flynn know, if this were a different era, we’d be sending him off to live with a wealthy relative who could more adequately afford his hollowed leg eating habits.

(Next day) At one point last night, it was up for debate…whether Micah had already consumed a chocolate cupcake with chocolate icing.  There was a tupperware of them on the counter for the last two days (when I actually DO bake something, we savor it…one a day…cause we won’t see this again for a while.)  Chris and I are each on the sofa in the living room, he’s completing his online spanish course and I’m reading a book about raising a confident child…Micah, our MOST confident child is asserting to Chris “I SWEAR I DIDNT HAVE ONE!”  It was one of these evenings when we gave the kids a choice, “You can have a cupcake, a juice pop or a pack of gummies…”  Its hard to keep track of who has decided on what dessert and they seem to all want to claim their dessert at different times.  Some kids want to go ride their bike while other kids want to be in the tree house while still other kids are swinging from that same tree, all choosing to enjoy their dessert at a convenient time.  Chris looks at me for some assurance…”Did he have one?”

“I honestly don’t know…”

Micah has now started to approach me from across the room…”You can smell my breath mom!” he begs.  I close my mouth tightly and begin shaking my head adamantly with my hand in the air (in an effort to halt him in his steps)  When he reaches me with his mouth open, ready to blow his non-chocolatey breath in my face he clearly hasn’t received my message and instead of stopping in his tracks, proceeds to slap my outstretched hand a confused high five.  I was taken by surprise and Chris and I both started laughing.  Micah has such an innocent nature underneath his layers and layers of mischievous, trouble making characteristics.  He is our most misunderstood child…even by his own parents.

While all the kids were at school the next day I was really trying to tackle the changing of the seasonal clothing while purging and filling the back of the van with donations.  Once when I went to the back of the van I got the brilliant idea to bring Max’s umbrella stroller into the house for him to climb in/push around/fill with stuff.  I’ve always found my toddlers to love an empty stroller.  I parked it inside the front door and went back to my chores.  He immediately took the bait.  However, it was not long until I began to hear an old familiar sound…the sound of A SUPREMELY PISSED OFF TODDLER!  Not pain, not hunger, not whining…he was just pissed.  After his third bout of severe anger at the stroller I went to try to help remedy the situation.  He had a belt buckle end in each hand and I watched him fumble the two plastic pieces together while twisting and writhing in anger.  I tried to buckle the stroller belt to appease him.  WRONG!  That just pissed him off more.  “WHO DOES SHE THINK SHE IS?! ROLLIN UP HERE AND JUST USING HER BIG STUPID HANDS TO DO THE THING I CANT DO!” I tried to take the stroller away, to fully release him from this hell, but he insisted on coming after it and holding onto it.  I gave it my best shot.  I withdrew to the kitchen to attend to last nights’ pots and pans and it was from there that I offered these few phrases of comfort to my struggling offspring…”Oh wow, I can tell that you’re so mad.” and “Uh oh.  Sounds like someone isn’t having any fun.”  and “I’m sorry that you’re feeling so frustrated.”  I was eventually able to distract him with a snack and I got that stroller out of our day as quickly as my genius brain thought to bring it into our day.

That afternoon when I approached the school doors to pick up Owen, he came walking toward me with the biggest grin on his face…”MOM, you embarrassed me at lunch today!”

“ME? How?!”

“You put that note in my lunch that said you loved me!  My friend Atrayu (coolest name ever) had one too!”

I felt privileged to be lumped into a group with Atrayu’s mom…mom’s of first graders who embarrass them with their lunch note professions of love!

The kids usually pack their own lunches simply because the lunch packing population varies on a day to day basis and also, there are five of them…and that alone can be quite overwhelming (no, I’m not just figuring this out now…)  Some of my kids are crazy about chicken fingers and some of my kids detest them.  So 15 minutes before morning departure when someone has caught wind of the school lunch option and announced that they wish to pack lunch while I am reading a board book to a morning fusser or brushing someones hair or tying a shoe or GOD FORBID just sitting somewhere drinking a cup of coffee, I point them in the direction of the kitchen…alerting them to how little time they have to accomplish the task ahead of them and assure them that it would be in their best interest to clean up after themselves.  Owen however, had asked the evening before if I would please help him pack his lunch the next morning.  With adequate notice and the polite interaction (in other words, all my unreasonable demands were being met!) I said “SURE!”  Plus, he is my first grader and while I can be a rather hardened old broad, he does fall in the scope of my children who still require more of me than some of the others.  He hand selected his items and helped every step of the way, but at the last moment, when he wasn’t looking I was able to sneak an “I LOVE YOU OWEN! I HOPE YOU HAVE A GREAT DAY! note in without his knowledge.  Every kid had gotten at least one of these from me…I’ve met my quota.

Twoish weeks later Owen and I are back at it, co-packing a lunch.  He stares off for a moment while sitting at the kitchen table, then looks at me, “Mom, did you and Atrayu’s mom text each other or something?”  Laughing at the idea that he is still so baffled at the presence of a note in both he and his friends lunches from their mothers on the same day, I explained that we did not text each other…that we are both just moms who love our little boys.

Sitting around a campfire with some friends while the ladies discuss home life affairs and probably complain about most of it, Chris interjects…”Autumn is so good at doing my laundry…when I come home from work and there is a pile of perfectly folded laundry sitting of my dresser…It feels like I have a maid service or something…I feel like a king.”  I looked at him and I just wanted to cry.  Chris is not one to fill the air with fluffy words.  If he says it, he means it and while he thanks me regularly for my hard work for our family, its usually within our four walls.  He isn’t the guy who gets on social media and offers a tribute to his lovely, beautiful, hardworking wife.  Frankly, his kingly laundry announcement around a campfire with some close friends means more than the big show any day.  Because thats our life.  Its a lot of in between.  Its a lot of cleaning up after meals.  Its a lot of mundane duty toward one another.

Not enough research, not enough charts, no funding to study the specimen that is the person keeping the home fires burning for the ones who have to go out and get stuff done in this big, wide world.  I think if the research were undertaken by some brave institution they would find, after a lifetime of serving and investing in her loved ones…she is HAPPY.  She is completely insane…mind LOST in the shuffle, but she is undeniably happy.

I was in the bathroom the other morning when I heard a domestic disturbance begin one door down, in the boys room. Recognizing that the last task I asked them to do was pick up their clothing, I felt the need to monitor slightly, even just to ensure the completion of the chore. As I enter the room Micah (8) pops his head up from his top bunk. Owen (5) is standing on the ladder to the bunk and the argument is in full swing. I ask what’s going on.

“Mom! Micah has more land than me!”

“What are you talking about?” I’m patient and puzzled.

“No I don’t, Owen!” Micah has a gnarly scowl in place

“Owen, your bed is the exact same size as Micah’s bed…they are the same bed…just one is on the top and one is on the bottom…” I’m curious as to how this became an issue to begin with, but then I remember what they are supposed to be doing and I realize that they would rather be doing anything than actually picking up their dirty laundry…so we’ll call this one of their completely irrational, out of thin air arguments.

As I reason with Owen, while he stands above me…looking down from the bunk bed ladder, he hangs his head and exclaims,

“But Mom! He does have more land than me!”

“What do you mean? ‘He has more land’?”

His hand are holding onto the ladder…”He gets to have this ladder…”

Micah will not sit idly by while Owen poses an illogical argument…”I need the ladder to get up here!”

This could have gone on for hours if I didn’t direct it otherwise. I made sure that Owen knew that he may hang out on the ladder and I made sure Micah knew that the ladder was not part of his “land”.

Sometimes I’m positive that I am a smart, talented, and even efficient human woman…it just so happens that most of my time is taken up settling disputes of rightful land ownership. Or chicken nugget ownership. Or silky gym short ownership. Sometimes it doesn’t feel like very important work. I actually have to write a blog post to remind myself that the work that I’m doing here is sacred work. It’s work that most women would choose not to do. Some days I just want a career. I want a clock to punch and a piece of paper at the end of a long week with a dollar amount printed on it that accurately communicates to me my worth within a company or business. For now, I just get to vent to my husband and listen to him tell me that he knows it’s hard to be a low level referee for the town lunatics. He will tell me that even if no one else appreciates what I do here, he does. And that needs to be enough. And it is. I am enough.

And someday, this blog will be here… waiting for our five kids…and they will take a sober glance into the secret, special thought life of their mother and they will know…that they had surely driven her to madness!

Thursday, April 28th…I pick the kids up from school and Iris has tears in her eyes.  She claims she has had a stomach ache ALL DAY.  She mentions that at one point she was on the floor, resting her head on the seat of her chair.  I asked why the school nurse didn’t contact me?  She insists that the nurse touched her head with “a thing” and told her there was nothing wrong with her.  This was a bit disheartening simply because Iris loves school and she isn’t a huge faker…and I wondered how the nurse and teacher aren’t also aware of this.  We went home and she missed her piano practice and passed out on the couch.

Friday, April 29th…4AM…I am awakened by Max, screaming through the upstairs.  I go to him, bring him back to bed and nurse him.  Within 10 minutes he is back in his crib.  I lay down on my pillow, that I thought was my friend.  My eyes are closed when I hear Owen ask if he can climb in bed with us.  Chris is extremely talented at NOT LETTING OWEN IN OUR BED.  I, however…am not.  I imagine, like our 3 older children…soon enough he will not be interested in crawling in our warm blankets and finding comfort from the long night.  He is permitted.

Friday, April 29th…6AM…Iris has entered the room and walked to Chris’ side of the bed to audibly cry that her belly hurts.  I am uncomfortably positioned as close to the edge of the bed as I can be while still remaining in the bed.  I attempt to sit up to assist the crying child, but it feels as though my neck just might be broken.  Pain.  Pain in the neck…literally.  I cannot sit up.  This is a familiar pain that has plagued me a few other times in my life.  Most likely my pillow was not supporting my neck properly for those last two hours of slumber…and now I’m experiencing a pinched nerve or something.  With my head still laying on the pillow like a pile of bricks, I turn the rest of my body and pseudo spin off the bed and I am then able to drag my head, while it is fully bent forward (the only position that doesn’t hurt) and I rise to my feet.  I alert Chris that we have a code red and that he needs to get up…immediately.  Iris climbs into our bed and now two people who are not the owners of our bed…are sleeping in our bed.  I barely muscle to my phone to call my chiropractor…out of the office till Monday.  The last time this happened, it was so tense the first day of the injury that he couldn’t help anyway.  A day of belly aches and ADVIL and icy hot were in my future.  Iris slept most of the morning and watched an old 80″s movie (per Chris’ suggestion) the rest of the day.

Saturday, April 30th…Chris is home in the morning but will be leaving shortly to go bid 3 drywall jobs.  He is scouting out the bacon and I must be understanding, for I too like bacon and he happens to be better at finding it than me.  I am not, however, excited to be navigating the unnavigatable ship that holds 5 of the most unruly shipmates one could ask for.  Our friends who own a piece of recreational camp land are hosting a “work day at camp”.  Even with my immobile neck, I am aware that if I simply make it to camp…my kids will find tasks and adventures to keep them busy.  While cleaning up flood debris and “camping out” under a bridge, Iris steps on a rusty nail.

Perfect.  No we don’t have Tetanus shots, because I’m one of those idiots who imagines their babies eyes rolling back in their head while their body seizes and frankly the cocktail of Diphtheria, pertussis and tetanus all swirled together makes me a little nervous. AND Chris had a bad reaction to the shot when he was young so I was basically waiting for something like this to happen that would force me into getting the shot for the kids.   Naturally, because Iris has never received a shot before, she immediately starts softly crying to herself while she eavesdrops on my conversation with her dad on the phone.  In all my reading, I learned that its usually within 3-20 days after the infection that Tetanus sets in.  Since the family doc was closed for the weekend we monitored the wound closely.

Sunday, May 1st…we go to church, then to our favorite Indian food buffet and then home, to putz around and hold my neck very still.  I am looking forward to going to my chiropractor as soon as the sun comes up on Monday morning.

Monday May 2nd…I drop the children off at school and drive around with Max in his carseat until he falls asleep and I head to my chiropractor’s office for a 9:30 appointment.  I lug the gigantic forward facing carseat into the waiting room with me in an attempt to keep Max asleep.  Unfortunately, two extremely enthusiastic grandparents were shout-talking and sharing pictures of their grandchildren.  I felt half tempted to ask if they would like an extra grandchild to care for while I had may neck adjusted, for it was only moments later that Max woke up.  I kept him detained while my neck was placed back where it belonged.  He sat like an angel, a gift that I am exceedingly thankful for, as I have trouble having my neck cracked while someone in the room is screaming.  That tiny 20 minute nap just so happened to mess up the rest of the day for Max and I.  If you have a 14 month old or have ever had one, you know that the nap schedule can be very delicate.  He only went to sleep at 1 that afternoon and when 3:15 rolled around, I found myself standing on the sidewalk, looking in all directions for a warm body to stand guard at my home while I picked up the other 4 kids from school.  No dice.  Neighbors weren’t home and it felt too “bad parenty” to ask the person sitting in their parked car to “watch my house” while I picked up my other kids.  So I woke him up and he wasn’t happy and he was even less happy at Flynn’s baseball game that evening.  I didn’t imagine that my family could get on people’s nerves at a baseball game, where you assume its ok to take kids, but we were successful at receiving more than 2 or 3 nasty glares from people who just didn’t want to listen to our toddler cry or our 7 year old son and his 10 year old sister wrestle on a blanket and they definitely weren’t crazy about the fort our five year old was building on the bleachers…all while the parents tried to be interested in their OTHER son’s baseball game.  Extra circular activities don’t feel meant for large families.  Homeward bound…and exhausted as hell.

Tuesday May 3rd…the tiny puncture where the nail went into Iris’ foot is looking red.  I waste no time, we are scheduled for 11:30 Mother/Daughter Tetanus Shots!  She was so terrified that I told her I would go first (I haven’t had one since college, so why not?!)  Of course when we arrive the receptionist tells me there is something wrong with some words printed on our insurance cards.  They insist that unless their practice is listed as the Primary Care Physician…they can’t see us.  This was a mistake, we had just received new insurance cards and they chose our PCP for us and I didn’t even notice.  I insisted that we have never gone to any other doctor’s office EVER and I wasn’t sure how this happened.  I proceed to call our insurance and wait while they change the information in their system and then hand my phone to the receptionist so they can be like “BLAH BLAH BLAH”…”OK…BLAH BLAH BLAH.”  We are taken into the exam room, where they begin prepping Iris for her “VACCINATION!!!”

I mention, “Actually, I was going to get mine first, just so she could see that it isn’t a big deal..”  The nurse responds, “Oh, didn’t they tell you…yours was cancelled.  You can’t just ‘get a tetanus shot’…I mean, when was your last one?”  I’m confused…how else do you get a Tetanus shot than to “just get one”.  “My last one was in college, maybe 12 years ago…”   She goes on, “Well I’ll ask, but I don’t think it will be approved.”  WHATEVER.  The nurse returns a few moments later and says the Nurse Practitioner is running behind and they are going to go ahead and give us our shots.  Maybe that’s how you “just get a Tetanus shot”…come when they’re running behind schedule and they’ll just DO IT!  Iris watched while I held Max with one arm and they stabbed me in the other.  I didn’t even feel it.  Her turn.  She turns her head away from the prepared needle and dramatically places her hand over her eyes to hide her tears.  By the time she was done with this swift, expressive motion, so also was the shot.  She couldn’t believe it.  We were outta there and eating some horrible Wendy’s fries in no time.

Wednesday May 4th…Nothing considerable to report on, aside from endlessly dismal weather.  The kind of weather that you don’t even think is bothering you until your five year old says, “I miss the sun.”  So did I.  Where did the sun go?  The largest positive to the horrible weather was that baseball practices and games kept being cancelled, taking otherwise stressful evenings of trying to feed people by 5 O’clock and bundle up for long evenings outdoors and instead placed us all inside, to draw and play games and ALMOST MURDER ONE ANOTHER!  The winter was too long.  We all want to be outside.

Thursday May 5th…Aside from the bum out forecasts, another thing that had been deeply effecting my mood was the consistent smell of heating oil in our home.  Since last fall when our rusty heating oil tank decided to finally fail us and leak fuel all over the basement floor, we have been dealing with a light aroma of the fowl stench here and there as Chris would have to transfer some into the tank, only up to the rusted point, to keep the hot water flowing.  This week he decided to unhook all the fittings in preparation to hook up the new tank.  The smell gave me this depressed feeling about cleaning my house.  Why bother cleaning a house that stinks like heating oil?  It made me want to evacuate with Max everyday.  I mentioned a few times how much the smell bothered me, and that maybe it was even giving me a headache but I’ve found that sometimes the people in my life need me to get out “My Megaphone”…or else I’m just not taken seriously.  Chris set up a vent fan to draw some of the smell out of the basement until he could get around to closing everything back up. That was nice.  I expressed my appreciation.

Friday May 6th…My sister in law is an exceedingly talented massage therapist and she had caught wind of my recent neck injury and she sent me a text wherein she offered to help me out in the stiff neck department.  I responded to her that she was welcome to stop by, but that I really needed to stay home and get some stuff done.  I had been away from the house everyday that week, messing up Max’s delicate nap schedule and I was suffering the repercussions.  Around lunch time, I got a call from the school nurse that Iris had fallen on the roller skating field trip and she thought that her wrist needed to be looked at by a doctor.  (So much for spending a day at home.)  Chris was working locally so he picked her up while I called the family doctor.  A 1:30 appointment.  I couldn’t imagine that her wrist was broken because she was handling it like a champ, and she could move her fingers pretty well.  I asked if there was anyway Chris could stay home while Max napped and then possibly pick the other kids up if this took a long time.  “Sorry hun, I just can’t.”  Join the club.  This is where I will briefly mention that being a mother can feel quite lonely at times.  You have created a person or GROUP of people and at times all their needs run together.  Meeting their needs is a job that I only feel comfortable asking my husband and maybe a relative or two to help with.  Call it a defect of mine, but it is just how I am.  This is going to change soon.  Soon I will be posting a Facebook announcement about how badly I would like to go on a date with my husband for his birthday and I will be asking for any and all qualified babysitters to come out of the woodwork.  This is what normal people do, I think.  So Iris and Max and I head for the doctor’s office.  “WE’RE BACK!” I jovially exclaim as the same nurse practitioner who saw us on Tuesday steps into the room.

 We are sent for X-Rays across the hall and then given a disc with her images on it.  I have come to realize that when you are “given the disc” it is because something is wrong and you shall take that disc with you on your future medical journeys.  We are taken back into the original exam room where we are told the wrist is broken.  I was incredibly surprised, as I looked at Iris, balancing the wrist on an old tablet from her dad’s work truck.  They were out of slings so we were sent away with the same grubby tablet we came with, holding the hand steady upon it.  I was asked to sit down with the referral department, but unfortunately the other 3 kids needed picked up very shortly and there just wasn’t time.  They told me they would call me.  (Insert down pouring rain while I attempt to get the freshly maimed Iris and her baby brother into the vehicle…the normal things I rely on Iris for, buckling herself, closing her door, she cannot perform.  I finish running all around the vehicle, securing everyone and turn to load the stroller…it has blown to the end of the parking lot in the downpour.  Insert also, me not loving any of this.) Around five that evening I am told to take Iris to an urgent care facility to have the wrist splinted for the weekend until we can have it casted on Monday. That night we ordered pizza and listened to our kids complain that they would have rather had Chinese.

Saturday May 7th…I get up and make waffles and Chris leaves to complete a few hours of local work.  I take the kids to the park where we bask in the partly cloudy skies, teasing us with the occasional ray of sunshine.

When Chris returns I take 2 of the boys to the thrift store to get some bike helmets.  Flynn finds a pair of those God forsaken sneakers with wheels in the heels that are basically another broken wrist waiting to happen.  We spend the afternoon in the parking lot…that we live in…on our bicycles and end the night with Uncle Ben and Aunt Mare roasting hotdogs in the back yard.  The neighbor girl sleeps over and aside from a super messy house, I feel thankful at the end of the day.

Sunday May 8th…Mother’s Day.  I’ve started telling people that I don’t recognize the holiday.  It is fully man made, like most (ALL) holidays and I used to feel entitled to some type of honor or homage and then Chris said to me, “You aren’t my mother…”  True.  And my relationship with my own mother has proven to be quite rocky over the past few Mother’s Days.  So I’ve found that expecting nothing is a much better approach to these types of things.  I much prefer to act as if it isn’t even happening.  My kids definitely pull through in the hand made cards and pictures department EVERYDAY OF THE YEAR, so if nothing is produced on Mother’s Day, its never been a big deal.  Iris did make me a super sloppy drawing of a heart that read “Sorry, I’m right handed”

 That really made my day.  I will say though, that I like to use this made up holiday as an excuse to not change a diaper occasionally.  So I wake up like any other day, cuddle Max, holler at people to get ready for church.  I sat at my little desk in our room to jot something down when Chris presented me with a small envelope.  I am astonished.  I open it.  A gift card for a massage and facial at a local Brazilian Spa.  WHAT?!  It says “From Max”…I knew that fat little baby would be my PAYDAY!

This is quite pleasing, especially because I expected nothing…I’m telling you, its the way to GO!  We go to church, go eat Indian food (I know, we have to skip a week or they are going to ask us to stop coming) and then we went to a Lancaster Barnstormers game with the kids + a friend of Iris’ (what’s one more?)  Chris and I took turns sitting with Flynn near the first base line while he desperately waited to catch a foul ball

and manning the other 5 at the play area that is a blessing to any parent who has ever tried to take little children to a baseball game.  The sun was so sunny and the breeze was so refreshing.  This was a perfect day.  If I did celebrate Mother’s Day, this was a good one.  We were about to leave the ball field when I received word that my 92 1/2 year old grandfather had died…on this, the Mother’s Day that I don’t even celebrate.  It was his time, he had lived a long life…but more than the actual passing of the old man, it stirs up so much emotion about how things change.  They never stop changing.  I spent my life going to visit he and my Grandmother in Connecticut, several times a year.  We would roughhouse in his carpeted basement until someone surely got hurt and I combed his hair for money and he let us eat colorful cereal that we never saw any other time. In November we went to visit for Thanksgiving.  He spoke with my kids about his time serving in the navy and shared pictures with us and it felt really special.

I sensed that we might not ever see him again.  My own father died in my Grampa’s basement, tragically and much too young…three years ago at the age of 60.  My Grandfather has buried almost ever person near to him, his two sons and his wife, survived now by his daughter, my aunt and his grandkids (8) and his great grandkids (14).  His passing will be the end of an integral part of who I am.  Another piece of my life, my childhood, my foundation…gone forever…left with only bits to tell stories of and photos to share.  Nothing can stay as it is.  Nature will not have it, and so we must not be foolish and take for granted what we have right before us…for someday it will be as distant as the sun.

Hindsight being 20/20, I can honestly say that my last week felt a lot like a shitty diaper.  Some diapers that you change are surprisingly pleasant, a nice solid bowel movement with very little clean up.  And some are what I like to call “Up the back, down the legs” kinda diapers.  This week was an  “Up the back, down the legs”.  You know there are things to be thankful for, like “At least I’m not wearing white pants.” Or “I’m so glad my baby’s systems are all functioning.” And you know that you will get things cleaned up, even if it takes rubber gloves and a power washer and a box of OxyClean.  Things are going to be OK.  They have to be.  But sometimes it’s nice to write a lengthy blog post about how shitty life can feel.

And thankfully, broken bones heal.