monday morning

and it is sort of quiet, sort of busy. Margaret, Kathryn, and Evelyn are at their friends' house. Ben, Joseph, Aaron, and Mali are still sleeping. Abigail and Mirielle are going ice skating, maybe taking Suzanne. Camille is getting ready for her nap. She is into everything these days. If the kids would always keep their stuff picked up and out of reach, it would make it easier.

I plan to stay home today. I already have clothes in the washer and in the dryer. I have to go out shopping tomorrow, at least a little bit, because I have to get the drinks for our New Year's celebration at church. We are getting together for dinner, then fellowship, bouncy house for the kids, ect., until at least midnight. By drinks I mean Coke and Pepsi, not beer and wine.

So, today I stay home. I will start with the kitchen. I really want to mop the floor today. The other night, I was in a huge hurry, making some homemade pizza dough, and the kids had to get out the door at a certain time for ice skating with the youth group. Suzanne and Jon were making pizzas in her Easy bake oven, so I thought I'd do the same in my big oven. I found a recipe for baking powder crust (which also had some yeast), that didn't have to rise for more than a few minutes, so I got moving. And I dropped not one, but two Pyrex glass baking dishes to the tile floor, smash, crash, scatter.....STAY out of here, kids.....do NOT come in here. Joseph was in the vicinity, and grabbed one of the brooms.....we got it cleaned up relatively fast, and even vacuumed afterward to get any stray pieces. So the pizza was wolfed down rather quickly as they left....sometimes, the more I try to hurry, the more messes I make. I get scatterbrained and distracted. And now I am down two of my favorite pans. They were 13by 9 baking dishes...

It would be more fun to clean the house if it actually stayed clean. Another thing on my to do list: potty train the lazy Charlotte Claire. She is 2 years seven months now, and perfectly capable. I bought her undies for Christmas, and she just says no.....so I have to talk it up a bit, and once she is up for it, it should be pretty easy. It will be nice to have just one in diapers. It is wierd to think that if Camille is my last baby, and she gets trained in a year or two, I will have no one in diapers for the first time in 24 years. I cannot even calculate how many diapers I have changed. And, I used to use cloth diapers. Which I loved and hated. I loved the satisfaction of clean folded white diapers. I hated rinsing the dirty ones. I used them when Emily was a baby and we didn't even have a dryer. I just hung them on a rack, or out on the clothes line. I was expecting my 6th child when I moved here, and I switched to disposables because of the distance between the bathroom and the washing machine....I was afraid to carry the heavy pail so far, being pregnant. And I haven't used cloth diapers since. I still have them though, you never know what is going to happen. They might come in handy some day. And thus the reason for the bursting closets.....

Samuel is growing out of all his jeans, and I don't think I want to save them for 4 year old Jonny. He won't fit in to them for 7, 8, 9 years.....because Sam and Jon are 9 years apart.

Well, I know darn well what I am doing here: postponing the inevitable. So, here I go to get some things accomplished.