Update

The kids were super happy to find the new family, the Monsons, have five kids and go to our church. The bad news? They just flew in from the States so they were so tired the kids were sleeping on the couch amidst the movers. Oh well. They'll adjust and be ready to play in a day or two. Other good news? Mary and Auntie came today and cleaned the house. It is totally worth every penny we pay them. My house is shiny clean and the double bonus? Brian doesn't have scouts for the rest of the summer so he gets to come home and actually enjoy the clean. Usually he gets home late from taking the train home and basically goes right to bed. As much as I like a clean kitchen counter and dining room floor, he really loves it.

Good Day

About six weeks ago we ran out of rice. Off to the basement I went to refill the cute glass jar we got for our wedding. I set it down to check which bin the rice was in and bumped it from it's perch onto the hard, cold concrete floor. It smashed to smitherines. It was sad. I cried. (okay, maybe not). So for the last month and a half, this has been my solution:

A burlap bag thrown on the floor next to the bookshelf two steps outside of the kitchen. Classy, I know. I've had it on the shopping list and checked every store I've gone into since. They were always too big, too wide, too tall, too expensive. Today I dropped Maddie at preschool then ran into Safeway to get potatoes to feed our dinner guests tonight. SCORE!

They had these perfect $9 Rice Bins on sale for $3.29. Excellent. So good, in fact, I bought two so I can shift stuff around. Now we're set. New bins. New life. The stars continued to align and look what I did to our countertop.

I found it. Pretty, isn't it? I cleaned it! You can even see the reflection of the fruit bowl it's so shiny!

Toilet Update

All toilets were cleaned today by 10:47 AM. Just in time to pick up Maddie Mae from preschool right on schedule.

Cleaning Up for Company

I'm having company for the rest of the week. My sister and her three little people are coming in about twelve hours. I was up late, late, late cleaning off the counter top in preparation of her visit and for making bushels and bushels of applesauce this week together. Anyway, so I was cleaning the kitchen up. You see, she's the clean one in the family. I'm the clutter bug. Maybe the best example is from the days when we shared a room as kids. She actually put tape down the floor of our bedroom to divide the room in two so she could have some "clean space" without my stuff "messing it all up." Too bad her side of the room was the side without the door. That meant she would have to cross into my side, the dirty side, to leave the room. A fight ensued...mom came in...tape was removed. I also remember a blue dresser we shared for a while. It had two doors on the bottom that swung open. To latch it closed you had to have both sides close together. My stuff was always falling out and making it so she couldn't close her side. Made her nuts. Know what else made her nuts? Oh, gosh, I'm all giggly just thinking about it! She would make her bed every morning. It was perfect. Sheets and bedspread tucked and smoothed to perfection. I would get my sheets up in the general direction of the pillow area and throw the bedspread over the top. Good enough for me. Here's the good part. When she was gone, I'd go over to her side and press my finger ever so gently into the middle of her bed to cause just the slightest of wrinkles in her bedspread. It would make her go bazerk! My poor mother. We did NOT get along. Don't worry. We're great friends now, but it wasn't pretty for a long, long, long time. Like from her birth until she was about 16. Of course, most of the time, she started it. Not me. I was just standing there doing nothing. So I cleaned and organized and put away all sorts of stuff. Piles shrunk by measurable quantities. Many items were returned to their rightful places. The recycling bin received generous donations, as did the trash when I finally gave up on the ginormous stack of broken toys of dollar store quality that just happened to fall in. Then the kids woke up this morning. Time's up. I did a little more this morning to dejunk the place, but didn't get far with Jacob and Maddie. Kristie will never notice, but I made a huge dent in the messes strewn all throughout our house. I worked hard. So I felt tired tonight after last night and then picking apples solo with three kids for three hours and the long drive to the orchard and back out in the lovely countryside of Virginia. Instead of scrubbing the toilets tonight after the kids went to bed I caught up on all ya'lls blogs. Yep I did. Read everyone. If you wrote in the last five days I read it. And that's alot of reading, folks. A lot. Then I talked to the hubby for an hour updating him on the exciting news of the day and the small glimmer of hope that Maddie might be coming around to potty training. Now I've sufficiently rested myself from the labors of the day so I'm ready for bed. Maybe I can scrub a toilet or two during my sanity window tomorrow morning while Ben is at kindergarten, Maddie is at preschool and Jacob naps. Cross your fingers and say your prayers that he naps at the appropriate time tomorrow. If not, my awesome tidy sister might see a dirty bathroom. Gasp!! It wouldn't be the first time I was caught. I hate cleaning so much that I always wait until the last possible second to do it. I remember one time in particular. Talk about last minute. Brian's parents were coming to visit us at college. Life was busy, blah, blah, blah, whine, whine, whine. I found every excuse in the book not to clean the bathroom until I actually heard a knock at the front door. I jumped to attention, ran into the bathroom, shut the door and cleaned that dumb bathroom while Brian greeted them. Tell me it isn't obvious when your guests come into your tinsy apartment and can hear you working and can smell the obvious scent of cleanser, etc. I knew I was caught. And I knew it wasn't the first time either. Embarrassing. Oh well. Like they didn't know I was a weiny before that dumb day anyway. Too late. Brian already said "I do" years earlier, sealing the fate of another totally innocent family. They're stuck with me. For better or for worse. In sickness and in health. With clean or dirty toilets. Oh heck, I could have cleaned all four toilets and Maddie's potty chairs while I wrote this. Sorry, K.

Consolidating and Clean Up Weekend

Consolidating. That's the best way to describe my weekend so far. The fridge was out of control. Since I dropped in at fridge clean out time for both Soderborgs and Pam, we had some (okay, lots) of that stuff you just sort of keep around. You know, stuff that's still good and you don't want to throw out, like ketchup. We had 3 bottles of BBQ sauce, 5 jars of jam, 6 pie crusts, 2 mustards, 2 soy sauce bottles and other similar things hanging out in there. Basically we had no room for real food. Sounds funny to say, but it was liberating to combine the bottles and in twenty short minutes, I had an entire new shelf available. Simple pleasures in my life feed my weird quirks. We also worked on other areas of the house. The bain of my existence is the kitchen counter. It was so out of control. I got it somewhat organized and nabbed all the finance stuff (bills, receipts, statements, and the like) and had it all nicely piled to file in the cabinet. Then someone needed something and then something else and something else and before I knew it the pile was redistributed across the counter. I had better luck tackling the piles in my bedroom, though it doesn't show it. I got through a lot of things and put them away, but didn't consolidate into any fewer bins of junk. All the preschool pictures are printed out for the entire year. They are sorted and organized so I can cut and bag them so we're ready to go next week. I've made a lot of progress this weekend. What's the bonus? It's a holiday weekend so I have one more day!! Now...should I keep cleaning or relax?

What Daddys Do

Today we were prompting Ben to memorize his part in the Primary program at church in October. It's a whopping two sentences. Not a big deal, but he's making it one. "Fathers are to preside over their families in love. Mothers are to nurture the children." Brian asked, "Hey Ben, what do fathers do?" Maddie interjected, "They 'posed to CLEAN THE KITCHEN!!!!!" Yes. Thank you Maddie. Get to work Brian.

It's Swim Season Again

Know how I can tell that it's swim season? The kids bathroom is always littered with swim suits, towels, swim diapers, socks, shirts and shorts. It is a never ending battle. I just walked into the bathroom and saw for the first time in three months the tile floor. It was beautiful. I had forgotten we had a floor in there. It made me so happy inside I thought I might want to enjoy it by sleeping in there on the floor, in which case, I suppose I might want to sprinkle some swim suits, towels, shirts, shorts, socks and swim diapers all over the floor for padding.