Wacky Wednesday!

To sort of quote Jerry Garcia from the Grateful Dead, "What a long strange morning it's been!"  And the day promises to continue on in that wacky, wild way that we do things here.  For one thing, it's an early release day which means the older kids (plus a neighbor friend) get out of school at 1:50 ... right during nap time.  Not terribly convenient for this family with babies who nap, but we will tweak today (as we moms are famous for doing) and hopefully no one will fall asleep in the stroller on the way back down the hill toward home.  Once we get home, hopefully with my fingers crossed, we will end up with an okay quiet time in which Liddy & Ashley will sleep and the bigger kids won't spend the entire afternoon telling me they are bored. :)

But as I said above, the morning was interesting, too.  We had some real excitement here on Greenbriar Court ... as you will see.  First, we vacuumed.  And when I say "we" I mean all three of us; me on the real vacuum, Ashley on the dust-buster and Lydia with her purple vacuum that also talks and tells you how dirty your floors are.  There was quite a bit of vacuum waltzing going on (and if you say it in your German accent you sound cooler, "vacuum valtzing").  Fortunately we only got tangled up in the cord that one time.

Next, we loaded the dishwasher ... did I say it was enthralling around here or what?!?  This was exciting because I had to work with great speed to out-sort Lydia as she tried to unload the dishwasher faster than I could load.  I'm proud to say that I won.

The true excitement came when a large delivery truck pulled up across the cul-de-sac to unload a new refrigerator.  This event caused us to drop everything and park ourselves on the front step so we wouldn't miss anything.  We watched as the delivery men removed the front door from the hinges, loaded the old fridge on the appliance mover and replaced it with a shiny new silver refrigerator.  Wow!

Just before lunch, we played a few riveting games at the table, which as you know is a bit of a challenge with a non-game-player involved.  In this case, we had two jobs:  play the games and protect all the game parts from Lydia's grabbing, crazy hands.  One moment it's your turn and then the next all your cards are missing and your marker has drool on it.  That definitely kept us busy and was by far the most exhausting part of the morning.

Now to the untrained, non-Mommy eye, this might all appear quite boring; but I think that we learned quite a bit and even enjoyed ourselves a little.

A few snapshots of the morning that have some sort of significance:

• As long as the kids are busy (even if it's with a pretend vacuum) they are happy,
• Someday my kids will vacuum for me and they will know how to do it well because they were watching well ... as they clung to my right leg,
• Dishwashers are wonderful machines:  even though it took a little longer to load than if I was doing it alone it is still faster than doing them by hand with little hands helping,
• While watching the refrigerator delivery we learned how to remove a door from its hinges, that fridges are heavy and require large "strollers" to move them, that spiders make spiderwebs and that we are glad God made us people and not spiders who eat bugs ... and that Mommy needs to sweep the front steps :),
• Lydia is really good at some parts of games, like dropping balls through holes and gathering cards; and not so good at other parts, like waiting her turn, not screaming when it's not her turn and not stealing all Mommy's cards when she goes potty, and
• Ashley is a patient and sweet big-sister who puts up with a lot (i.e. hair pulling, toy grabbing and a task-oriented Mommy) and is a wonderful role-model to her baby sis about how to clean-up, play well and be a helper.

So as you can see, even on a Wacky Wednesday, we can learn a lot and we even found a few sweet snapshots of life here with little people ... some which are really quite precious. :)   And I'm so glad I'm home to see them!