There are no words

You can't tell it in the picture but that's a Larry the Cucumber hat.

Remembering to be mellow

I finished the living room. Let's see a before picture again.

And another:

Now let's insert a picture of Eily for no particular reason.

Now, you have to ignore the boxes in the chairs. One is going to a PC show with me tomorrow and the other is a new cd player for the dining room and it just needs to be assembled. My living room always looks empty and non-welcoming in pictures but I promise it doesn't feel that way in real life. So just picture hominess. Thanks.

The next areas on the agenda are the hallway and the playroom. My mom has been over here twice when the playroom was destroyed and picked it up twice. One of those times was this morning and it already looks like this again. Oh well.

Can you tell they enjoy their playroom?

It is snowing here again. It's so calming.

And on the fourth day...

the living room finally became clean. Took me long enough, no? I kept picking it up but the deep cleaning would always take a back seat to something else. Tonight I pushed through and got everything but the floor cleaned. I'll have to do that when the girls are awake. I'll take after pictures and post them then.

Guess who we now officially own!! It's very exciting!

Today I thought about the fact that I keep saying I'm going to teach the girls how to do things in the kitchen but I never actually do go through with it. It's so much faster and easier to do it myself and really, when I'm on a mission, if I have to slow down or if I get interrupted I get irritable and unpleasant. I've been implementing "mellowing out" into my daily life and so today I decided that the girls would make the deviled eggs for church tomorrow despite the fact that I was trying to get a lot accomplished.

Elaina was the egg cutter and Claire was the yoke scooper.

Elaina lost it near the end of the cutting and scooping due to what was later discovered to be a horrible ear infection.

But Claire was Miss Cheerful and Helpful today and together we finished filling the whites and then eating what was left of the filling.

Didn't they do a good job? They even peeled the eggs beforehand,I just didn't have the camera out then.



P.S. Claire is so stinkin' cute!!

Pepto by the gallons.

One good thing that comes from having an upset stomach is privacy in the bathroom. None of my children stayed in there more than 5 seconds.

I have been gone, we have been sick and obviously, I have been cleaning. But I thought a quick hello was in order and I wanted to share this apron that I saw in a catalog today. What a clever idea.

TMI

The Living Room got worse before it got better.

Jason stayed out with Claire a bit longer than the rest of us so that she could model.

Deck the halls with cheerios and play-doh, fa, la, la, la, la....

Well. First things first. It snowed. I mean really, really snowed. This is the first you-can-play-in-it snow that Jason and I have ever shared together. It was so fun and if the girls weren't already sick we would have played in it for hours.

Second. My house is in its worst state of all times. It is just so messy. So, I fgured that at some point in your life you had let a room that you were responsible for just get away from you so therefore you wouldn't judge me too much for what I am about to do. I am going to share the disaster and then share the cleaned version. Please still love me. Please still come to my house. Please don't judge me.

I didn't take a before picture of the kitchen but here's the after shot.

Isn't it so nice and clean? It leaves you feeling so peaceful...but wait! No! Don't do that! Do not look to your right!

I told you not to. That still doesn't seem too bad, right? Let's look closer.

See. It get's worse the more you look.  But even that mess seems like something you could knock out rather quickly in a day. But then you turn around. *shudder* I can not believe I am showing you this.

Oh. My. Word.  How horrible is that? Never mind. Don't answer me. Look at the clothes waiting to be washed again. That's right. AGAIN.

These are almost all "clean." They were dumped on the living room couch on a day that I had devoted to laundry and then this and that got in the way and they never got folded. And then they got trampled on and sat on and burrowed in and rolled on. I decided the best way to tackle this situation is to rewash everything and fold the clothes AS THEY COME OUT. So far it's working. Back to the other messes. Look at Eily's area of the dining room. Blech.

Double blech.

It looks like I had swept this in a pile but I hadn't. There was just so much that it started to be a thick layer of grossness.

Even Pink Bear looked forlorn all cast aside in the rubble.

So yesterday I cleaned the kitchen and then today I cleaned the dining room. I mean some deep, deep cleaning.

Now these pictures I am more than happy to share. :)   (Notice these are all extra-large.)

Let's zoom in on the floor where all the laundy was earlier.

Ahhhhh. It feels good to be able to breathe again. Unfortunantly, we are about to turn to the left. Here we go again.

And this is where I start tonight. I have to go fold the rest of laundry and then start in on this, this terrible, awful situation.  Believe me, there will be after pictures posted very soon.

Hope you feel good about yourself now.


just keep swimming, just keep swimming, just keep swimming...

Sometimes one feels the fatness a bit too keenly and is forced to let up on the Cherry Sours.

That one is me.