Summer Insanity

Last night my honey took all four boys to go get some firewood for us.  He asked me if I wanted to go along.  And then he laughed.  I think he spotted the twitch in my eye and sensed the excitement that soundly coursed through me.  "Home? Alone? You would take all the boys and let me stay home? Alone?"

He loaded up all the boys and headed out.  I grinned like a wild woman.  I flitted from one room to the other not knowing where to spend my precious alone time.  Do I clean the kitchen?  Do I take a nap...oh how tired I am?  Do I read one of the books I have stacked by the bed and the computer desk? Do I watch the movie waiting for me to watch for two weeks now?

But I knew what I had to do...blog.  I have missed it more than I have missed about anything else this summer.  

Well, blogging and walking the track at school every morning when I dropped the boys off at school all those weeks ago.

So this is what we have been up to...

Cooking.

I have cooked so much lately to keep my boys fed - how much they can eat is insane - that my cupboard has given out on me, crashing down on itself.  This requires me to do some rearranging.  Because I can not - at all - give up one of those cookbooks or printed recipes.

Cooking so much means I have spent a lot of time at the grocery store.  Taking all four boys to the store is a trip.  Good grief, they want EVERY bit of food.  They ask me a million times, "Mama, can we get this?'  Recently, in the ice cream isle, S4 asked, 'Hey, Mama..." for the 1,000th time in a five minute span.

I felt myself slipping into that insane place mother's go.  They get there by their name being called too many times in a row.  It flips a switch in their brain that makes them cower in a corner crying for someone else to come take over.

"What? What? What? What do you want now??????" I  quietly wailed.  It was hardly a peep, more an escaped thought.  There in the ice cream isle I caught a glimpse of my reflection.  My hands were tangled in my hair, massaging the headache that doesn't go away.  My eyes were wild with craziness.

S4 looked at me oddly for a moment.  But only a moment.  "Can we get ice cream?" he asked.

To save myself from having a melt down in the ice cream isle, I said yes.

They are getting to me, these boys.

We have been spending a lot of time at the library as well.

Getting to work the same days the kids programs are is really grand because the boys never miss a single library event.  And all should know by now just how much I love the library.  If you look very very very closely, you can see S1 is holding something. 

A ground squirrel.

Now, when the boys go out to play at the library, Alicia and I find ourselves saying - oftentimes now in unison - "Stay together. Do not try to catch anything. Do not get bit. Do no catch anything.  Did you hear me?  Do not bring any animals into the library.  And stay together."

I don't think they hear us.

When we are home, the boys are catching "things".

This is One Eye Toad.  He is called this because he has one eye.  He lives on our front porch and I don't know how old frogs get but he is pretty old.  We look for him every year for a few years now, always relieved when we find him.  One Eye is never allowed to live anywhere but the porch.  The boys know, this is Mama's toad, it never can live in the sandbox or with the other things.

Other things?

Oh, you know, like five snakes.....

Originally, we purchased the large water tank for baby chicks.  The baby chicks grew up grandly in that water tank lined with sawdust.  And when we moved the tank out back for future chicks, the boys got to thinking how grand a place it would be to house some "critters".  

Like reptiles.

So it is currently the home to five snakes (there were six, but they made their favorite snake (how does one even get to have a FAVORITE snake?) a "home" in the sand box, where it slithered away.  Probably to live somewhere far far far away from boys.), a snapping turtle (a little one) and too many frogs to count.

Due to the drought we are experiencing here in this part of the state, the swamp where all these frogs were caught has dried up.  The boys now feel it is their duty to keep these frogs alive for future generations of frogs.

At least they don't live on the porch anymore.

And when the boys are playing in the sandbox making those beaver habitat's, they are in the woods building forts they would like to move into.

It is quite obviously a safe place to sleep the night in.  Mama just keeps saying no for some reason.  

Silly Mama.

So that, dear friends, is what we have been up to.  On our slow days.  

I forewent a nap to share this with you.  That's how much I have missed you all.  Hope your summer is going grandly too, and you are not insane yet.  Tell me what you have been up to! Link your favorite posts! I am so behind in reading up on posts right now as well. 

Special thanks to my hubby who gave me some free time and didn't complain when all i did was type away at a computer screen.  I love you!

Too Busy with a Perfect Day to Blog

Sometimes I am just too busy to blog because it’s a perfect day.

Here, where we are, the H1N1 flu has hit our community hard. We have numerous school closings and we know three children who are down with the flu.

We are also experiencing the coldest, wettest fall we can recall. It is looking like we are in for a doozy of a winter. They are comparing it to a winter I do not recall, having not been born yet, but I have heard stories and as soon as I mention the winter to those older than me, they all have stories upon stories upon stories of how awful it was.

All of this was preceded by a cooler than normal summer. Truly disappointing, even our crops had a hard time growing not to mention the beach days we missed out on.

But back to H1N1. Many of the local schools have closed to help kids get over the flu. R.C.’s kids’ school was closed and she called to see if I could watch her two boys, CC and MC. Since CC and S2 are on the same soccer team, the same church class and so on and so forth, they are good buddies. MC is S4’s very very very very bestest friend, and he gets along great with S3. So, the boys were ecstatic they were coming over, until they realized they would be in school.

When we watched the weather, we seen that after days of spitting snow flakes, thirty and forty degree temps, we were going to have a day that was nearly seventy degrees. Seventy. That is darn near tropic.

Hubby has been working third shift all week long and that night as I called him to tell him goodnight I all but begged that the boys could have a skip day of school. “I’ll have RCs boys and it would be so much easier if I had our boy’s home too. Especially when I watch Jr later in the day. They all would play so well and, well, it’s going to be the very last nice day of the year!”

I nearly fell when he said “Yah, I guess they could.”

They have never ever had a skip day.

All the boys were in bed already so I never told them till they awoke me in the dark morning to find out if their school had been closed too…three of our closest schools in the area were closed from the flu already. “You get to have a day off today, and be sure to thank your Daddy.” I mumbled to them.

They shrieked in glee. They can shriek very high pitched and it’s even louder when you haven’t even been awake for a full 60 seconds yet!

As I stumbled to the kitchen I was surprised to see it was raining. Rain had only been a very slight possibility. And here it was all drizzly and dreary out. But there was no turning back now.

We made chocolate chip pancakes; CC and MC were very impressed. By the time it was all cleaned up the rain had about ended. Just when the boys were getting a bit rowdy, the sun was coming out. I sent all six boys out to play.

And play they did.

They played football, soccer and catch. They gathered wood to make a pretend campfire only to realize that they could make a fort….and that is when the fun really began. At the thought of making a fort, well, that was a lot of boy power!

The day reached nearly seventy. By the time Jr arrived at one in the afternoon, I had been outside most the morning clearing out all sorts of dead flowers from my front flower gardens. When had I let them get so bad? I can now use that front door, without letting grass in. It cost me getting poison ivy on my arm, but it was defiantly worth it!

When the bus arrived to drop off the renter’s (IM, fourth grade along with his sister, high school), the boys gleefully waved to their friends stuck on the bus on such a sunny day. IM got the low down on the new fort and it wasn’t long before all seven of them were out to build it up some more. When they were tired, they played soccer or football. Because, when you are tired that’s what you do, right, run around playing? When Jr was awake from his nap, we went out to check out the fort. I pushed him around in the stroller. It was as if even a five month old little boy could appreciate the gift of the day.

Dinner time came and I made sloppy joes, fried potatoes and left over mac and cheese from lunch. Never have I seen food disappear so quickly. I was finishing making Hubby’s lunch while they scooped out food. Five minutes late to the table and I was literally scrapping the bowl to make a sandwich, usually we have enough left over make lunch for two more days!

All throughout the day, one of the boys would comment on how beautiful it was, how nice it was out, how great it was to be home, how this was the greatest day ever.

And it was a great day. A treasure day. A day to not soon forget.

It was a truly perfect day.

But perhaps these photos will help you realize why there are days in a row why I just don’t have time to blog. But I assure you, it was worth it!